


ask me if i’m hungry

by silentwalrus



Series: caveat emptor [5]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Casual Sex, Ed vs Law Enforcement: Nobody Wins, F/M, M/M, Men! Getting! Pegged!, Party politics, Police, Post-Canon, Trans Male Character, a buncha OCs - Freeform, ed @adrenaline: lol fucked around and got addicteeeeeeddddd, more undergrad shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:46:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27626990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: Winry comes visiting for a whole week, primarily, she says, because she doesn’t believe Ed has friends. “I do too have friends,” Ed argues. “I have lots of friends -”“People you’ve fucked once in a train station bathroom don’t count, Ed -”“One time! That was one time!”“- and I’ll believe it when I see it,” she says, to which the only response is to hang up and resolve to take her to one of the neverending sports parties.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Original Male Character, Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell, Mei Chan | May Chang/Alphonse Elric
Series: caveat emptor [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790881
Comments: 97
Kudos: 347





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title from hungry by suzy wu
> 
> tags will update.

Winry comes visiting for a whole week, primarily, she says, because she doesn’t believe Ed has friends. “I _do too_ have friends,” Ed argues. “I have _lots_ of friends -”

“People you’ve fucked once in a train station bathroom don’t count, Ed -” 

“One time! That was _one time!”_

“- and I’ll believe it when I see it,” she says, to which the only response is to hang up and resolve to take her to one of the neverending sports parties. 

Winry arrives sunburned, freckled and having sprouted six new piercings, which is pretty much the expected state of things. Ed shoulders her duffel and waves for a cab where the rail station disgorges into the street, his chin bumping her clavicle when she commandeers his free side for a slightly sticky spring hug. 

“What, no Luggy?” 

“She’s with Paninya,” Win dismisses. “I gotta go to Basar after this, it wasn’t worth it to bring her. Anyway, did you hear about the gondola plan for Rush Valley? They want to set up a line all the way from the rail station to the second ridge over the canyon -“

Gondola talk turns almost immediately onto Rush Valley’s prototype super magical theoretically hopefully please gods earthquake-proof electric grid, which is a _fun_ problem and at least half of why Ed stayed in Rush Valley as long as he did in 1919. Building an earthquake-proof grid is impossible, but you _can_ make an earthquake-resilient one; power lines can be disrupted and poles can fall down, isn’t much you can do about that besides speed up response time, but the reactors and converters take a lot longer to fix than some downed poles and snapped wires and _those_ can be built in quake-absorbent frames. A lot of people _are_ experimenting with shakeproof poles, too, the ones in the city at least, because generally if you tell the average Rush Valley local that something’s impossible they’ll have twelve prototypes for you by Monday. 

That takes them all the way to the apartment, up the stairs and into the kitchen, where Winry proceeds to say, “No, I ate on the train, it’s past dinner anyway,” while actively rummaging through their fridge. “Shut up, I’m just pregaming, you’ve _told_ me how your imaginary sports friends drink.” She extracts a cucumber and Al’s leftover dumplings and starts crunching as she hips the door shut, cheeks hamstering. “We juft waitin’ for Al, righ’? An’ Mei?” 

_“You_ get to tell him you ate his dumplings,” Ed warns over his shoulder, towing Win’s duffel to his room. He hears a squeak and then some hasty re-fridging noises. 

“Okay, but what I mean is, how much time do we have,” Win says, reappearing in his bedroom doorway and wiping at her mouth like that’ll wipe away her sins. 

“Depends on how long it’ll take you to get ready,” Ed says skeptically. 

Win scoffs, striding over to unzip her duffel and start her usual routine of dumping stuff on Ed’s desk chair. “Like ten minutes. It’s some college party, not the Winterball. _And -“_

She pops up out of the duffel and spins around with one hand cocked on her hip, waggling a familiar cheery green case. “I brought the strapon.” 

Ed groans even as her goofy bouncing eyebrows do start up a tingle. “You just want me to look at your clit piercing.” 

“No I don’t! With the strapon on you can’t even _see_ the piercings. _How_ are you such a squeamy baby about this, _I_ don’t know…” 

_“Needles,”_ Ed stresses for the billionth time, catching the case when she tosses it at him. “Going _under_ your skin, it’s - why does this have eyes?” 

“What? Oh. Paninya said it looked like a frog.” 

“She put frog eyes on your dildo case.” 

“Yes,” Winry says very seriously. “And I expect you to ribbit when you come. C’mon, you said the party’s at nine, we gotta shower.” 

The shower’s not exactly roomy, but it’s not like they’re doubling up to get some space. Win pins Ed facefirst to the shower wall - after some yelping and struggling because tile is _cold_ dammit you have to warm it _up -_ and rubs on him until he’s pushing back into her, after which she takes her hand away, makes them _both_ wash their hair, full shampoo and conditioning, then has them soap each other down _and_ towel off and is eyeballing the blowdryer when Ed finally scoops her up shrieking and bodily delivers her to the bed. Which is what she was going for in the first place. 

“You can just _ask,”_ Ed complains, groping around for the damn frog dildo. “I’ll _do_ it, it’s not like I _won’t.”_

“But this way’s more fun,” Win says chirpily, batting her eyelashes and then cackling like a witch when Ed wangs the dildo at her. She catches it easily and points it back at him like a broadsword, striking a naked pose. “Do you really want to be so uppity with me right now?” 

“Uh, have you met me?” 

“You better watch it, mister.” 

Ed makes his eyes big and his voice high and quavery. “Or what? You’ll _frog_ me?” 

This time Win tackles him onto the bed, going right for his jugular and savaging a hickey onto it despite the fact that the dildo is trapped somewhere between them and is trying to give Ed a new bellybutton. Things continue in this vein for a bit - Ed always forgets how _toothy_ Win gets, but it’s fun to get the reminder - before she finally lets up to wipe her mouth and find the strapon harness. 

She doesn’t much like penetration (“What, ‘cuz if ya stick somethin’ in it all starts clackin’ and janglin’ like a discount cowbell?”; “I’ll put _you_ in a cowbell, you ungrateful overfucked oaf -”) but she likes being the one putting it to him just fine, which is a state of affairs which has worked out extremely great for them, historically. That means Ed gets to flop on his back - Win likes him face up, at least to start - while Winry does the frankly hilarious hop’n’yank to get the strapon harness on. It also makes everything jiggle in extremely distracting ways, so by the time Win crawls onto the mattress Ed’s pretty much ready to go.

“Well hel- _lo_ there,” Winry says, giving him a friendly little pat on the pubes. “Looks like that estrogen doodad is workin’!” 

“Oh, no. Zero out of ten,” Ed says flatly. “Sex disqualification. Medical equipment is not dirty talk.” 

“But I’m just saying how wet your pussy is,” Win says innocently, uncapping the lube. 

“Those are _not_ the words you used. Terminology matters. And don’t you pretend like your favorite part of my vagina ain’t how it’s got biotech now.” 

“You gotta admit it’s cool,” Win says in a reasonable voice, in hilarious contrast with the vigorous jackoff motions she’s doing to lube the bright green dildo. “The fact that you can just stick it up there -” 

“Yeah, yeah, y’all’re building a better fuck in Rush Valley. I’m just glad Paninya didn’t put eyeballs on that thing too.” 

Win cackles, then starts looking thoughtful, so Ed spreads his legs all the way out in a side split to distract her quick before she decides to start a new line of creepy automail sex toys and make him the demo test for all of them. Win hums approvingly, her face going satisfyingly greedy as her gaze drags down and then back up his body. “Arms up. Show me.”

That brings a little heat to Ed’s face as he stretches, arching his back a bit to push out his chest and wrapping his hands around the headboard struts. Win grins down at him, rewarding the obedience by shimmying up and showing him how she squeezes her own tits. “Knees too,” she orders. 

“Aw, c’mon.” 

“Up, I said. Do it.” She punctuates by dragging her nails down his inner thigh, digging in just sharp enough, and Ed hisses and does it, heat flaring up as he pulls his knees to his chest. But it has the intended effect, namely, Winry sticking her dick in him. 

Ed sighs out, Win bites her lip, they both nudge around a bit, and then Win starts to move. She likes to start slow, dragging, her strokes deep and leisurely because she knows it drives Ed crazy and won’t make him come; resistance is futile, so Ed’s usual strategy is to get Win just annoyed enough to shut him up without crossing the line into pissed enough to edge him. So he rolls his eyes at her grin and wraps his legs around her waist, trying not to pinch with the automail but tight enough to stifle her thrusts and shove her dick into him, deep. 

“Did I say you could do that?” Win demands, but Ed just moans in overblown delirium and drags his hands through his hair. “Oh _no,_ I’ve been _bad,_ are you gonna _punish me -”_

Win brays laughing so hard she nearly falls over, hands slamming into his chest to keep herself upright. “No. You can’t. I can’t,” she wheezes, face going crimson. “You. No. That guy - in Kessel - who asked you - who’s your daddy -” 

That sets Ed off instantly. “You should, have told him,” Win gasps as Ed claws the sheets in hysteria. “You shoulda said - known enemy of the state - that’s _classified -”_

 _“Classified,”_ Ed howls. _“Who’s your -_ who’s your daddy - that’s _classified_ -” 

“Who’s your daddy,” Win growls in terrible approximation of the sexy voice the dude had tried, and Ed nearly eats his own tongue. “This is a military investigation -” 

“Stop! Stop!” 

_“Have you seen this man -”_

“We don’t - have time for this - Al’s gonna come home -” 

_“I said who’s your daddy -”_

Ed laughs so hard the dildo jolts out, which doesn’t exactly calm him down any, and Win, wheezing, eventually has to smother him with a pillow. “Okay,” Ed gasps, clawing his way back to air, “okay, real sex this time, for real, no D word,” and Win agrees, “The only D right now is this dick,” which at least gets them back on track in the mechanicals. And Win must’ve caught a glimpse of the clock or something, because she doesn’t start with the slow shit again - just lines herself up, still giggling, and starts going to town. 

It’s good, as usual, even if neither of them can really keep a straight face, as usual: she bares her teeth at him, he flutters his lashes at her, she pinches his nipples until he repents and directs his energies towards meeting her thrusts. Win might like to start him face up, but through a lot of trial and error they learned that he just can’t come like that, has to be belly down, so when Ed feels it start to build he hikes a knee up and Win gets the point, pulling back enough to let him turn over. He kneels up for her to push back in, her chin hooking over his shoulder, and from there with their hands overlapping as they reach for his clit it goes easy: Ed tips right over, bracing on one hand as he comes gasping. 

Win stays with him, as usual, not letting up with her hips or her hand as she pushes for the second go without waiting for the first to subside. Ed squeezes his eyes shut and rides it, biting his lips to catch the noises in his teeth as Win presses in _hard,_ cresting him over again. She stays close, grinding in, draped over his back; Ed feels her breath hitch in his ear and her thighs shake against his and know she’s coming too. 

She slumps her whole weight on him for a moment, and Ed lets his right hand sway down to the mattress to brace them both. It doesn’t last, of course: Win’s hips begin to shift again, dragging the cock out of Ed in a way that makes him twitch. Both her hands settle on his hips. “Nice,” she pants, starting to thrust slow but with a clear intention of speeding up. “That’s two. Wanna break a record today?” 

“Nooo,” Ed groans, because while one of the things T did was take his orgasm average from ‘laughable’ to ‘hilarious’, they do have somewhere to be, like, soon, and Al and Mei _will_ be here before then. “We gotta - uh -” 

“Betcha I can get ya to three.” 

“I - mm - know you can, _you_ know you can, it’s not even a _challenge_ -” 

“Sure it is,” Win grunts, and speeds up.

And people say _Ed_ is competitive. Winry’s got some kind of insane mental tally where she’s on this eternal quest to like, get him up to par or something, because she still thinks he just wasn’t trying hard enough to have a normal sex life as a teenager. Ed likes to point out that the whole apocalypse thing going on might’ve had something to do with it, Win usually responds by wondering why the imminent demise of their nation would have anything to do with his masturbation technique, they have an argument about the theoretical upper threshold of quality even possible when you’re on the run from the feds, and either way the sex pretty much always ends with Win slow-roast porking him like she’s trying to make up for all the wanks he didn’t have while he was trying to keep them all from dying. 

Ed realizes that he probably shouldn’t be thinking about masturbation stats or the apocalypse while getting dicked, just as Winry also seems to realize he’s being too quiet and sinks her nails into his asscheek. Then there’s a sudden bang, which is very clearly the front door whacking open. “Here, we can - oh, Ed’s home,” comes Al’s voice. _“Brother! Come help carry this -_ oh. Winry’s here too. _Never mind! Shower first!”_

Winry cracks up as Ed groans and lets his knees slide them flat to the mattress, Win riding him down like a gleeful toddler on a deflating balloon slide. “Okay, so much for _that_ orgasm,” she snickers. “We’ll take a raincheck, how bout that?”

 _“Ugh._ Now we gotta shower _again.”_

“Don’t bitch, it’s just a rinse this time. Come on, up, up, before Al wedges the door shut again -” 

It turns out - once they’ve pushed each other out of the shower and into pants - that what they’re helping Al carry is more of Mei’s mail. She’s officially here as an alkahestrist with the Xingese delegation and is technically staying at the new embassy, but mainly what that means is she’s using the diplomatic mail access to ship a billion kilos of interior decor across the border. Ed’s not sure what the fuck she even puts on the forms, because she’s not _decorating_ the interior so much as terraforming the whole apartment. Admittedly some of that was Ed - the original floorplan sucked, he fixed it - but now stepping into 2B-2427 Hickory Street is like being teleported into a particularly intense Western Xingese teahouse. 

Ed knows for a fact that Mei’s not just disassembling and reconstructing her childhood home in their apartment, because he’s _been_ to the Chang clan compound and Mei grew up sleeping in a communal brick kang bed where the heating stove doubled as the family kitchen. The only alternative that leaves, however, is that she’s piecemeal importing Al some kind of miniaturized palace, which objectively considered is insane and not something Ed at all objects to. Okay, he was like ‘what the hell’ in the beginning, but that was mostly because Mei _and_ Winry kept saying the place was ‘barren’ and ‘looked like a creepy squatter’s camp’ and anyway ever since Mei put up the snarling lion statuettes Ed has been a hundred percent on board. 

At this point they’ve got damn near everything but a moonfish pond, though, so Ed can’t fucking imagine what the fuck is in these crates. Actually a moonfish pond would be cool. Maybe he’ll put one in himself. Mrs. Chagat who owns the nail salon downstairs doesn’t care what they do since they fix up the building and Ed walks Chowder all the time; she’d probably be cool with him messing with the backyard. 

The crates, it turns out, are full of rugs. Half full, at least: Ed realizes this was all packed and mailed by the Chang personally when the rugs are unwrapped and unfolded to reveal endless packages of newspaper-wrapped yolk cakes and dried fruit and cough drops and stomach medicine and pickled vegetables triple-cushioned in spare socks. For a clan that let her cross the desert alone as a child, Mei’s entire family sure seems pretty convinced she’s going to simultaneously starve to death and die of every disease possible in the howling wasteland that is the capital city of Amestris, population Only Five Million. 

“You want them to have sent me _mail_ when I didn’t even have an _address?”_ Mei demands when Ed mutters something or other to that effect. “When I was wandering your country hunted by demons and murderers?” She sniffs. “Besides. They could not have afforded it then.” 

That’s true. Mei’s a whole little princess now, always done up fancy as all hell even when she wears Amestrisan stuff. First thing Yao clan did upon taking the throne is start throwing out alliance offers right and left, and they started with the smaller, weaker clans like the Chang: that way when it came to approaching the bigger, wealthier _competing_ clans, the Yao could point at their nice shiny new coalition and say, all friendly and diplomatic-like: hey. Everybody else is doing it. Wouldn’t want to be left out in the cold alone, now would you? 

So that worked, more or less, and Mei’s mom immediately did the smart thing and packed Mei off to a bunch of alkahestric temples and famous teachers all over the ass ends of Xing, because while Chang might be tight with the Yao now that doesn’t mean that they can dictate terms yet when it comes to marriages and business deals. The Chang know Mei is a critical fuckin’ asset now, and _continuing her education_ and _leveling up into an even more badass alkahestrist_ are reasons that potential suitors will accept as reasons for why Mei _isn’t_ currently on offer: it’ll just make her a sweeter get down the line, after all. It sounds like a whole lot of hell to Ed, personally, but Mei doesn’t seem to mind, even if she does agree they’re all just lucky her mom wanted her little girl to see the world and get experienced and build outside connections before turning up formally at the fucking knife party of the Imperial Court. 

Ed’s well aware he and Al are some of those outside connections, and that that’s why they were allowed to travel with Mei to the alkahestry temples and incidentally hit every sightseeing spot along the way. _Al_ is a lot more than _potential_ suitor now, and since Mei’s all over him he’s been given a probationary sort of dibs. It’s not like they’re living in sin or whatever - Mei’s grandma had made a lot of terrifying comments about fresh horses and testing new bridles that Ed understood just enough of to blush anytime she cackled - but nobody’s made any promises and nothing is set in stone. 

Not that Ed’s worried. Mei swoons every time Al so much as flushes the toilet, and Al’s quietly but obviously just fine with Mei’s semi-dictatorial takeover of his life. They wear little matching outfits, for fuck’s sake. Al even helps her with her hair now, sitting in the living room together with him on the couch and her on the floor, getting ready for the party, and it’s - well. Really cute. Sweet and all. Hard to look at. 

It’s not that they get mushy or gross or anything. It’s just that Al’s face is always - serious. Open. A little awed. He’s falling in love. 

Ed’s so happy it’s bruising his ribs from the inside. He can’t separate the ache from the light. Wouldn’t if he could, maybe. Nothing is permanent; all things change. And so he makes sure he doesn’t avoid it, doesn’t try to look away from Al’s happiness, from the future he’s building that’s going to take him far away.

Or at least not until they turned the hair messing on _him,_ because it turned out in his efforts to not avoid it he ended up looking like he wanted to _join in_ or something. He had to tell people he lost a bet or something, because ‘my three-calcium-supplements-a-day little brother and his five foot tall girlfriend held me down and gave me pin curls’ is not a scenario he wants to advertise.

Anyway, these days it’s _much_ safer to beat feet back to where Winry’s hogging the bathroom. Ed is not fucking showing up to this party in a crown braid. 

Win’s fuckin’ topless again, which briefly reminds Ed about that KIA third orgasm, but given she’s armed with a mascara wand it doesn’t last long, just disspiates back out into a vague throb. Honestly, he’s just glad he can have sex with her again. It’s a thought that crops up often, oftener still when she’s in his space, leaning on the bathroom counter, three inches away from the mirror and squinting her eyeliner on while he drags the heavy-duty brush through his hair. Getting over himself took a while, and at first it really fucking sucked, but then he went and found out he _could_ fuck people without any feelings involved whatsoever, or at least not any more than a vague appreciation of form and cursory approval of character. It kind of balanced things out, going so far in the opposite direction. Or maybe it was that they just weren’t living in each others’ asscracks anymore. Ed hadn’t known he’d need to move around so much, when growing up moving around was all he had. 

He still doesn’t quite know _why_ he got… stuck, with Win. It feels like something he _should_ be able to want. He likes Paninya fine, and Marli, and that guy with the dreads who runs the big machining shop closest to Winry’s workshop. They all like him fine too, and he wants Winry to be the farthest thing from alone. But sharing her attention with weekend trips to clients and eleven hour surgeries and days in the machine shop is fine. It’s just sharing with another lover that doesn’t… work. 

He can’t figure out why it doesn’t. He doesn’t want to be the guy who lays down ultimatums, who forces Winry to choose, who keeps her from loving everybody she wants to love. He doesn’t want to be the selfish, jealous asshole thinking _but what about me._

But, well. 

Thank fuck he went to Xing when he did, because they do this stuff _way_ differently over there and he learned a _lot._ He found out that _courtesan_ is a political office, for one, and that you can have as many spouses as you can handle, to the point where like five of their most famous comedies and drama plays are about people who had seven twin wives or disguised themselves as their fourth husband or whatever. Ling’s dad was the Emperor, but Ling’s mom’s _husbands_ are three totally different guys altogether, and Ed was there when Ai Chang congratulated her daughter on her choice of boyfriend but gently reminded her that she _was_ an Imperial Princess and a skilled alkahestrist and shouldn’t limit herself to just one. 

Mei had to smack Ed a bit to keep him from squawking on that one, but it led to a lot of really useful talking, and it turned out Al was at least in the know already about how he might end up having not so much competition as assigned group work. “You didn’t tell me that!” Ed exclaimed. “You didn’t say that you can _marry_ just as many people as you can _date -”_

“Amestrisans are strange about these things,” Mei sniffed. “Your inheritances are a mess, full of court cases and lawyers and public arguments -” 

_“Ours_ is a mess? _Yours_ is based on whether or not someone’s _royally related enough_ or not -” 

That one devolved into a bit of a slapfight about what constitutes a court anyway, but the point is, the Xingese have done this for so long that there’s _manuals_ about it. They have all this stuff on how to handle it when you… can’t handle it. 

“You are hardly the only one who doesn’t share well,” Ling’s mom told him lightly, Lan Fan lurking in the background as one of their escorts that day. “The Meng clan are famous for it, the Sung make it a point in their wedding contract stipulations -”

“Look, I just said I can’t be Li - the Emperor’s, uh, concubine,” Ed had said uncomfortably, but Zhiqi Yao had just given him a tolerant smile and carried on talking about how totally fine and okay barbarian monogamy was as if he’d said nothing. And then she gave him _Prosperous Fields_ , which was eighty-five percent about how to farm rice on a mountain and fifteen percent about how to manage your family when you’ve got only one spouse, or no kids, or wives and husbands and kids out the wazoo and you’re the one holding the clan title. A lot of it was outdated, preachy and self-evident - do not give one spouse more rice than the other, lest ye breed resentment, that sort of thing - but he figured what she wanted him to pay attention to was the bit where it talked about dealing honestly with your people and how to work with nature, not against it. 

There’s probably a prettier way to say it - the main text of the book itself was in the vernacular, but all the chapters began with a couple lines of poetry, and Ed got that it was a kind of topic-theme-moral card but he can’t understand full classical Xingese and he’d given up after mistranslating ‘persistence at a useless task’ as ‘goat hole’ despite an hour with _two_ dictionaries. (He’d finally given in and asked one of the bodyguards assigned to him for help. Deng Jun was pretty nice about it, or at least maintained a really good deadpan.) 

And _then_ when Ed went to return the book Ling’s mom gave him _The Golden Household,_ which was five percent politics and _ninety-five percent pornography. Prosperous Fields_ was clearly written by some stodgy old farmer, but this was a novel and probably first written in a greasy notebook kept under a mattress in some really shaky handwriting. Apart from the _billion sex acts_ described in _painstaking detail,_ it was the story of Golden Dawn, the third wife of some famous rich guy referred to only by epithets - it took Ed _way too long_ to realize this guy was an Emperor, and an actual historical one to boot, like the second guy to ever make it on the throne or something - and how she basically took over his entire court through the powers of pussy. 

The point _there,_ as far as Ed could tell, was that Golden Dawn succeeded in becoming Empress not by ousting her rivals but by bringing them over to her side, and then straight murdering the handful of remaining ones who wouldn’t get with the plan. So, okay, maybe more the power of unionization than pussy, but since her pussy was mostly what she was unionizing _with,_ Ed feels it counts. The message in this one also probably wasn’t ‘become one of my son’s concubines and stage an aggressive if not necessarily hostile coup, also here’s a step by step instruction manual of how to do that seriously upsetting thing on page two hundred and seventy three’, so it has to have been all the stuff about how jealousy was just a knife that stabbed your own back and to, once again, go with your nature instead of against it. Either find a way to handle it, some deal that works for you and yours, or get the fuck out. Oh, and maybe don’t make any risky moves against your enemies until you’ve got overwhelming numbers on your side. Around here we deal for keeps. 

Ed likes to think he got the point. He’s still got no idea how he feels about _Ling’s mom_ giving him _porn_ \- that’s a lie, he knows exactly how he feels and it’s “the Dowager Empress of Xing thinks I’m a barely literate barbarian slut” - but he can’t deny it was, y’know, helpful. In that he is definitely okay with not sleeping with Ling anymore due to getting some up close, personal and even _historical_ examples of what that entails, long term. Them fucking was fun, sure, but it wasn’t - critical, it wasn’t loadbearing, it wasn’t the point. 

And it’s not the point with Winry, either. She likes to have sex, and so does he, and they like it with each other, but it didn’t exactly break her heart when they went from whatever-it-was to whatever-it-is and all the inbetween parts where he fucked off to Xing. The point is, Winry _does_ love him, and he’s glad he can give this to her without shoving glass under his own fingernails for it.

They decide to walk to the trolley instead of squeezing into a cab, because it’s a nice night out and the line that takes a straight shot to the main University gates is right on the other side of the greenbelt. A gaggle of Al’s assorted medical ducklings turn up when they turn the corner, dressed in various flavors of nerd, which upon commingling makes starched-up Al and Mei in her perfect little green qipao look like a couple of peacocks accidentally walking in on a chickencoop. 

“Are _these_ your imaginary friends?” Win whispers in Ed’s ear as the chickens make undergrad noises at Al. 

“No!” 

“They’re _not_ your friends?” 

“They’re not _imaginary,_ and that’s Al’s club people, can’t you tell by all the cat hair -”

“What I can tell is that Al has more friends than you,” Win says, so Ed elbows her. “You just keep promising me they exist, somewhere,” she continues dolefully, shoving back, “but I’ve been burned too many times,” and their resulting slapfight carries them just enough ahead of Al’s group that they don’t really have to interact. 

It’s not that Ed doesn’t _like_ Al’s friends, it’s just that their schedules are largely incompatible and also they kinda think he’s a violent hooligan. Which, okay, he doesn’t give a shit about, only one day on his way home he saw what’sherface with the double braids toss a coin into the weird little memorial on the corner of Sixth and Plaza, set up by the Fullmetal Is Definitely Dead And The Government Is Covering It Up, Poor Lad Died So Young people. He’d wondered why the hell it was _there_ of all places before he realized that was the corner where he’d started throwing around alchemy and fix shit to lure out Scar, so long ago. He can’t fucking believe it’d made _that_ much of a dent. Braids chick has no fucking idea who he and Al are, obviously, and it’s not like she talks about how great and sad the Fullmetal Alchemist was or whatever, but it’s still something Ed can’t help but hold in his mind every time he sees her and the rest: candy and flowers and coins tossed into an urn with his name on it, cleaned out by homeless guys every night. Being dead and famous is weird as hell. 

It’s not so weird for Al, obviously, and while he likes his cat club well enough he hasn’t expressed any desire for them or Ed to be more than passingly aware of each other, which means Ed doesn't have to figure out how to get tight with any of them. And Ed _does_ have friends: it turns out that by joining the gymnastics team they’re assigned to you more or less automatically. 

The coaches still don’t really know what to do with Ed, but McKenna - team captain, represents them at student budget meetings, picks the aggressively upbeat music they drill to and is responsible for ‘morale’ - only wanted to know two things: can he do a handspring? More importantly, can he pay the team dues and equipment fee?

“Uh, yeah?” Ed had said, because he’d only come down to the gym to waggle his metal leg at them and find out if he could join at all, and one of the coaches had opened his mouth but McKenna had whirled and said _“The dues pay into the competition travel fund but he’s not going to compete,”_ and the coach shut his mouth, apparently having done the math. “Of _course_ you can join,” McKenna continued to Ed, in the bright sweet tones you use on someone you’re about to swindle into a new tax bracket. “Come on, let’s see what you can do!” 

Not even a third of what the rest of the team could, it turned out, but the coaches agreed he ‘had potential’ and not just because his acceptance meant basically free money. “And the more members we have, the more we automatically get from the university student sport fund,” McKenna had said, darkly satisfied. “Welcome to the team!” 

So Ed’s with the gymnasts now. He likes them, to his own surprise. They’re a lot less… damp than everybody else so far. All of them have been doing stuff by themselves since they were young, traveling alone to meetups and sport camps and competitions, and none are strangers to injury or hard training. Challaine ripped his whole hand open on the bars last week and it was gross as all hell and nobody blinked; three weeks before that Kel had gotten what McKenna called “intense” and what Ed recognized as the clenching, dry-eyed shakes that came after trying and trying and _trying_ until you felt crazier than nuts and the goal was _still_ just out of reach. 

A lot of the university kids just don’t have that. They’re not, like, _worse,_ they’re all normal people or whatever, but the way they live their lives is - kind of unrecognizable. The first time Ed heard someone say _I have to ask my mom first -_ well, it’s not like he _forgot moms,_ obviously, or the existence or function of parents in general, but it was this weird baffling window into how - well. How normal families work. Ed’s closest model for normal is Winry, and if not for Granny she’d be in the exact same boat as him, minus all the fucked up alchemy shit. Hell, even Teacher and Sig - that’s the closest place to home now that he and Al have got, probably, besides the Rockbell house, and even there it’s, well. Complicated. 

Sometimes Ed wonders what the fuck he’s doing, finishing out university. He signed up because Al made it sound interesting, and everybody agreed it was a good idea for him to - okay, sure, Win, _make friends -_ but in practice all the social stuff has been a constant oscillation of hilarity, bewilderment, anthropological fascination and homicidal boredom. He doesn’t, like, _need_ people to be talking about the meaning of life and death and the innermost laws of the universe at every minute of every day or anything, but half the time he feels like he’s in one of those dreams where he gets abducted by aliens and they’re all standing around discussing what bits to cut off him and he somehow simultaneously knows what they’re saying and can’t understand a word. 

Which is why the gymnasts are such a fucking relief, in some ways. Landy and Brinley and the rest aren’t gonna be winning any mentalist medals, but they don’t fucking have to. They’re easy to be with and they’re good people and they have a lot more in common in their childhoods than Ed ever expected, stuff like the travel and practice and pressure that he hasn’t really encountered much elsewhere in Central U. It’s not like Ed was unique in starting work young, but generally those who take apprenticeships don’t go on to university. If you’ve already got a working business at seventeen, going in for a degree at twenty is usually more a matter of personal preference than necessity. Winry’s toying with doing a formal surgery residency with one of the more specialized medical teams in Central or East, but she loves the machining aspects of making automail too much to depart fully from limbs into the finicky tiny-tube fields of gastro or cardio or even neurosurgery. Rush Valley is hard at work at making implantable artificial organs, but those have to be a lot more squishy and flexible and made of plastics than limbs do and Win’s a damn gearhead at heart. Besides, she’s having way too much fun making hardcore sport models for limb prostheses. Paninya has a set of legs that lets her jump over cars these days. 

And Ed’s got three fucking legs on her workshop wall, pretty much show pieces only at this point. His current leg isn’t anything fancy but does have titanium plating for the shinguard and kneecap and enough shock absorbers to let him do a triple layout on a trampoline run, because while Ed doesn’t get into nearly as much fighting as he used to Win knows he’s still not exactly living the delicate dandy life out here. He’s not sure he even can. Sparring is _fun_ , exercise that lights up his body _and_ his brain in that specific way, gasoline, highwire, and it’s one thing he’s not getting from gymnastics. 

Which he should really do something about, he resolves, as his and Winry’s shoving ends with him lifting her half over his shoulder as she shrieks, grabbing at his shoulders as he threatens to flip her into the park hedge. There _are_ martial arts gyms that’ll take people with automail, but those tend to be the bring-your-own-barstool everything goes places full of assholes with actual combat mods and something to prove, and Ed can’t be sure that if he actually has to fight for real he won’t instinctively resort to alchemy. The itch isn’t so bad yet that he _needs_ to scratch it, but the fact that it’s there in the first place is a warning sign.

Of what, he’s not exactly sure - it’s not like he thinks he’s gonna snap and start hitting people with the nearest chair - but people can tell there’s something off, and that tells Ed he needs to at least get a handle on what the fuck it is. Even when he’s keeping his mouth shut, copying Al and listening instead of talking - guys’ll get touchy, girls’ll get uncomfortable, professors and admins and coworkers get snippy or taken aback. It took him a while to realize that at least part of it is while he’s not _doing_ anything different than he used to, he just doesn’t look like a kid anymore. These days when he stares someone down they’re a lot more likely to square up or back away than laugh or get bewildered, and he’s reminded that he’s not elbow-high and thin as a reed anymore. 

He’s learned to make a little less direct eye contact and put up a lot more sweetie smiling, just so people would calm the fuck down around him. This is where the gymnasts score in high again, because McKenna and the rest showed him how you can do that _and_ still be a _weapons-grade asshole._ Seriously, even Mustang could take notes. It’s also possible nothing will ever top the way his face froze when Ed pulled that shit with the Soffler guy, which frankly makes all the rest worth it just by itself; he looked like he thought Ed was about to peel his face open and turn into a swarm of locusts. It’s not often Mustang looks _any_ kind of off guard, let alone frantically trying to signal _abort abort_ with nothing but his eyebrow hairs, so Ed’s gonna be cherishing that one for a good long time. It’d been a good fucking day. 

So yeah, Ed likes the gymnasts. Almost all of them are shorter than him, too. 

And, Ed learned, if you’re part of the team, you automatically get invited. To everything. Someone is _always_ having some kind of party, and the sports teams tend to be involved in some way or another. You can pretty much bring whoever, too, which is why they’re all out here right now, walking out along the canal towards the trolley stop. 

Ed and Win quit horsing when they leave the park, because it _is_ a nice night and there’s a bunch of people around who’d probably be a lot less chill with them when it might look like they’re about to flip each other into traffic instead of the nearest bush. Even after living in Central for a couple years now Ed’s still amazed by how it comes alive at night; there’s tea lamps and fairy lights strung across whole streets, wrapped around trees, tied into constellation shapes of stars and swirls and flowers, and out of the day’s heat the restaurants and bars throw all their windows and doors open, cigarette and shisha smoke trailing out, different strains of music somehow more intermingling than competing. They aren’t the only group headed for the trolley; Central U may be the biggest but it’s not the only university in town, and it’s Friday night right after midterms. 

There’s even a pack of bikers lounging around their motorcycles at the canal railing, parked across the pedestrian strip and the water access path with a radio playing. Ed eyes them idly as they walk past with Win doing the same next to him, though she’s probably focusing more on the bikes than the tattoos and leather. 

Then Win stops dead and seizes Ed’s arm with all five nails sinking in. “Is that a _Victory Six?”_

Ed says “What?” but Win’s already zipped across the street, hair flashing in the streetlights as she goes right for the bike. Ed groans and follows her, only glancing around when he realizes the rest of the group is hanging back - Al looking amused, Mei looking impatient, the rest of them looking like they’re not sure whether to stage an intervention. 

Well, whatever. “Just let her check it out, it’s not gonna take that long,” Ed tells them, turning back to follow Winry. “Y’all can go ahead if you like.”

He hears Al say “It’s fine,” still sounding amused, and it’s not in the extremely specific exasperated voice he uses when he says ‘it’s fine’ to _Ed,_ so he’s not talking to him. Winry’s already practically nose to headlights with the bike - yeah, okay, Ed might not know shit about cars and stuff but even he can see it’s a nice looking ride. The bike guys all look pretty surprised, but then again, Win’s a special kind of nerd. 

The guy with the bike is a big curly-haired dude, looking pretty taken aback to find Winry’s ponytail nearly going up his nostrils as she leans excitedly over the fuel tank, but he recovers quick. “Whoa there, honey,” he says, half-laughing. “Yeah, it’s a Six. You like bikes?”

“I _love_ bikes,” Win breathes, staring directly at the big shiny muffler. Then she remembers herself, flicks her gaze up at the guy and tucks some hair behind her ear, letting the corner of her smile curl up. It makes her face go simultaneously somehow wicked and sweet in that way that always leaves Ed equal parts dreading, turned on and impressed. “Can I sit on it?” 

A rounds of _ooooooh_ s goes up, the guys laughing and ribbing each other. “Sure, honey,” Curly laughs, not stepping back as he beckons, holding the handlebars. “Why not?” 

Of course, when Win swings her leg wide to saddle up, he has to step back quick anyway. “Wow,” Win breathes as she grips the handlebars, eyes shining. “How’s she handle? What’s the acceleration? I heard with the right mods you can hit a hundred in three seconds, but that kind of fuel injector requires modifications to the actual frame - do you race? Oh my gosh I’ve been _dying_ to try one of these, nothing made before 1920 has Schmit-Valce suspension -” 

There’s a lot more of that, but Curly’s just back to looking surprised, not hostile, which leaves Ed free to check out the rest of the guys. Bikes are cool and all but machinery in general’s pretty boring; what Ed likes about good rides is the indicators they provide about the driver. For example, the smaller the muffler, the smaller the dick. 

This lot looks much shinier and more put together than Big Mallie and her guys back in Rush Valley, but that’s probably just because Central’s all paved roads and greenbelts instead of a canyon full of yellow dust and scratching gravel. They also look younger than Big Mallie’s bunch, but that’s not hard - Big Mallie knew Granny Pinako back when she worked in Rush Valley, and three others actually went to school with her, with books and uniforms and everything, which is bizarre and _so weird_ and very cool. (There were photos. Ed had no idea Granny has tattoos and kind of wishes he could forget.) This lot looks a lot more like the people Ed would see hanging out around the spike bars in Dublith, back when he and Al were studying with Teacher: more decorative than utilitarian. 

No women, though. Ed had no idea Central even _had_ bike people, because it’s not like you _need_ one to get around or deliver mail or groceries and stuff and he hasn’t really seen any before, but this is a lot of bikes and maybe there’s other groups somewhere with their own garage. He doesn’t go out to the westside railyards much, maybe they all hang out there. These bikes all look pretty new and expensive, though. No cargo rigs, only a couple of passenger seats: all sport bikes.

Ed realizes, belatedly, that Al’s pals aren’t hanging back like that because they’re impatient to get to the party, it’s because this is a group of big dudes in gear that probably looks like it means business to someone who _hasn’t_ actually worn leather day in and day out and found out the hard way that the decorative shit won’t cut it for work wear. This here is a goodlookin’ enough bunch that Ed has to wonder if maybe they’re some kind of promotional team or something. New paint, polished chrome, thick arms, big boots, fun jackets; a couple of them glance back at his onceovers, but Win’s talking a mile a minute while wearing a party shirt that’s one zipper away from being two pocket squares and a shoelace all desperately holding hands. He’s not expecting to sustain attention here. 

There’s a big tall guy lounging in the back who’s steadily watching Ed instead of Win, though: long black hair in a tail, big broad face, Xingese or Khma or something, and he returns Ed’s up and down with an easy look of self-assured superiority. From over here Ed can’t tell if that’s just Smug Asshole or Smug Asshole, Wants to Fuck, so he just returns the most bovine blink possible and turns back to Winry.

“ - and I only ever saw it in magazines - oooh, I just wish I could try! Do you think I could? Just for a minute?” Win’s now moved on to the big pleading eyes, her whole face shining with the innocent longing of a wolf puppy staring at a flock of lambs. “Just up and down the block! Oh, I can’t believe I’m actually _touching_ one - please? Just once?”

“Well, I dunno,” Curly starts, half playful, “maybe I should get on with you,” but then the ponytail guy at the back waves a gloved hand. All the bikers’ heads turn to him in a wave. “Let her try.”

Curly looks like he’s about to say something, but he clearly thinks better of it after a second glance at ponytail guy, and in any case Win’s already letting out a whoop and starting the engine. Curly starts looking a lot more alarmed then, and he’s not the only one, but it’s too late: Win’s peeling out, the engine snarling like a happy tiger as a bunch of the guys start whooping and jeering too. 

“You can’t - she just - _hey,”_ Curly exclaims, looking like he’s building up to a real shout, so Ed steps over and knocks a boot against his. 

“Yo. She’s not gonna go far,” Ed says, just as Win hits the end of the access path and drags the bike into a sharp turn that lifts the rear wheel off the pavement. “We got someplace else to be tonight.” 

Curly whips his head around to stare wildeyed at Ed, then jerks back to Winry, but seeing her slalom back towards them at least keeps him from going full grizzly bear over one little joyride. The guys are ranging out along the edge of the path now, laughing and hollering to watch Win go; the med kids are still across the street with Al and don’t look a whole lot less puritan, but Al now looks tolerantly amused and Mei just looks bored. 

“Who the fuck is this girl?” Curly demands of the universe in general, staring after Winry, hands half-up like he maybe wants to pull some hair out. “Who just - does that?”

Ed helpfully gestures _out of town_. “Rush Valley.” 

“Oh,” a couple of the guys glance at Ed to nod knowingly, which means they’ve probably been, because even the rumors don’t do it justice. Rush Valley people are _crazy:_ it’s all people who’ve lost bodyparts and the mechanics and surgeons who experiment on them, and they all live in hilly, rugged country with deep canyons and sharp cliffs. That means a bunch of ex-soldiers and adrenaline junkies are lumped in with a lot of people who are unbothered by blood and nerve damage, and they all like to sit down with gears and tensor cables and engines and go _what happens if I do this?_ And then they _do it._ And getting around - due to the scattered farms and damn cliffs - is done either by donkey or heavy duty dirtbike. 

Ed’s seen Winry do a backflip on one of those, and it’s not like she’s gonna do anything crazier than that now, not with someone else’s bike. _“Do_ ya race any?” he asks instead, turning back to look directly at Ponytail: the dude’s definitely in charge. 

He’s also still watching Ed. “Oh, once in a while,” he says over the growl of the returning bike, eyes flicking down and then up again, lingering. “You Rush Valley too?”

“Sure,” Ed says, because these days Resembool is the place where mutton, wool and The Fullmetal Alchemist comes from, so unless somebody recognizes the specific accent he doesn’t bother bringing it up. “I don’t really ride, that’s all her. If you’re doing something this week, though, let her know, she’ll win you money,” just as Win squeals the bike back to a stop right in front of them.

There's a lot of whistling and clapping, and as usual Win eats it up as her due. “That was the _best,”_ she gushes, grinning around at everyone, killing the engine and flicking out the kickstop in one fluid move. She’s flushed all across her cheeks, visible even in the dark, and pretty much every pair of eyes is glued to her tits as she bounces off the bike. “Gosh, _thank_ you. That was _soooo_ fun! What’s your name again?”

“Uh,” Curly says, now looking a little dazed. “Sam…?”

“Sam! That was _great,_ Sam, you’re great, I _love_ your bike.” Win pops up on her toes, kisses his cheek just shy of his mouth, then twirls around while he’s still reeling and straightens her skirt as she beams at Ed. “Okay, now we can go!”

“Leaving so soon?” Ponytail says, his smile friendly, mostly for Win but tilting it Ed’s way some. “We got other bikes to try.”

Of course, sometimes being offputting comes in useful. Ed smiles back, nothing cute about it. “Told you. Got somewhere to be.” 

But Ponytail cocks his head, smile not fading. “Where you headed?” He doesn’t look put off at all. “Maybe we can give you a ride.”

He doesn’t say it in a pushy asshole way, either, just clear and direct, putting his interest on offer, front and center. His black eyes crinkle at the corners, calm, his smile steady with just enough of an edge to be interesting. 

Ed’s not about to ditch Win _and_ Al to do the hoochie high five under some bridge with some biker, goodlookin’ or not. But. Maybe he’ll take this way through the park more often.

He’s about to give the guy the friendly fuckoff when Win flicks him a glance, then tucks her hair back and bites her lip a little, smiling at Ponytail. “Well, we were on our way to a party.” Behind her, the med kids exchange horrified looks. “You guys wanna come?” 

Boy, do they. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ed discovering he’s monogamous: god fucking DAMN it


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everyone raise a cheer to aetataureate who beta’d this and stuck in some magnificent sentences to save me from axemurdering the concept of the written word in an underpass in the woods

It’s a big party. The equestrian whatever, the Amestrisan society of horsefuckers or whatever, has a whole old pre-Reform manor on the University grounds where all the stables and sports fields are, and the horse club kids get to live there as dorm housing because they need to be close to establish a telepathic dream commune with the animals or something. Ed grew up too close to working barns to see the appeal, but the point is that the horse people tend to host the big parties: big enough to have their own parking lot, which, okay, is probably for the horse trailers, but lets the biker guys park them all in quite nicely. 

Hay and horse shit wafts over the path walking up to the house, but stepping through the open door is like being hit with a wall of sugar booze, sweet tobacco and perfume. The first thing Ed sees is that someone has clearly stolen one of the public loudspeaker systems off the lightpoles on the Promenade and reinstalled it in the entry hall, which explains where the music is pumping from. There’re cables all over the floor and bare wires sticking out from a repurposed broomstick in between patches of tape and a scattering of alligator clips; this completes what looks to be a gruesome marriage between a radio and a record player, which, of course, means that they immediately lose Winry. 

_“Who did this,”_ she breathes, and they’re close enough to the group clustered around the wires that a guy with a broad, inebriated grin turns around and raises both arms in even broader victory. “That’s all Bret, yo!” someone yells, and a cheer goes up as the guy is subsumed under a round of backslaps.

Winry descends on him with her eyes wide in an expression to send sane men for the nearest drink, so Ed heads off to do exactly that. He changes course only slightly when he sees what he thinks is Landy but turns out to be some other girl entirely, holding a violently fuzzy golden puppy in her arms. 

This immediately takes Mei, because while Xiaomei is too big now to go traveling in her pockets, the essential lure of exotic purse dogs is embedded too deep to erase. Mei teleports instantly to the girl’s side, Al ambling after, and pretty soon all the cooing and petting over the puff turns into cooing over Mei’s accent and hair and oh my god, you’re from Xing? Like from _Xing_ Xing? That’s so cool, what’s it _like_ there? 

Mei eats that shit up with a shovel, so this leaves Ed with the med students and the bikers. This is a little like being in that river, wolf, rabbit, cabbage problem, only the wolves have all swum off by themselves and left Ed with like twenty rabbits and fifteen cabbages. The bikers are all looking around with interest, at least, while the med kids are mostly clustered up and looking both extremely hungry and deeply unprepared to do anything about it. Ed briefly considers fucking off and letting nature take its course, but that’d probably violate some law of party hospitality, and in any case, if twenty minutes’ riding bitch is enough to ignite this kind of high-speed sexual crisis, they deserve _some_ kind of intervention. 

“Y’all need some alcohol,” he decides, benevolently. “Come on. This way.”

The drinks table is more or less the entire kitchen, and they’ve arrived early enough that it only looks a little bit like a locust plague came through. Ed leaves his cabbage-rabbit convoy to sort it out themselves and heads straight for the Samagon, only then he sees somebody’s brought a whole tub of pear compote and abandons the vodka to ladle himself a full glass of that instead. 

Al turns up at his shoulder as he’s hunting for a spoon, mixing together something that Ed can tell at a glance is for Mei. “Yo, cough up the child support,” Ed says, nodding at the kids pouring themselves drinks like it’s baby’s first brain surgery on the other end of the long table. One of the weedier ones sporting a strict side part passes the tonic water to a bike guy with a neck tattoo, breathless lust so embarrassingly vivid all over his face that Ed can only shake his head. “Are they even allowed out unsupervised?” 

“It’ll be good for them,” Al says mildly, stirring. 

“Yeah, but, like, when you turn guppies loose you drop ‘em into the kiddy pool, not the piranha tank,” Ed says. “Look at them, they ain’t even got water wings. They showed up here _sober.”_

“So did you,” Al says, unperturbed. “I’m not their mother.” 

“Yeah, but _look_ at them,” Ed says, and would elaborate further only someone on the other end of the kitchen says “I can’t _believe_ they stuck Doctor Loveless with _Azine,”_ and Ed and Al both swivel in that direction as if magnetized. 

_Diagnosis Critical_ is, objectively, a terrible show. The whole premise is that there’s a team of alchemists and doctors that travel all around Amestris to various crises, using incredibly fake “medical alchemy” to treat everything from gleefully gory train crashes (always caused by Aerugan saboteurs or Ishvalan sympathizers) to completely made up diseases (always contracted, of course, on ill-advised trips abroad). This is all in between love triangles, drug abuse, secret marriages and long-lost twins, and you can’t go five minutes without discovering some character’s third or fourth dark dramatic vast mega secret. Ed and Al have the radio on every Tuesday eight pm on the dot. It’s so popular some Central production studio made a movie out of it last spring; Ed and Al hit the theater thrice, each time assuring the other that it was only because Evine Eian was playing Dr. Maire Hollow and wore dresses under her white coat that were probably a stoning offense in Aerugo. 

It’s also pretty fucking obvious alchemy propaganda, as one of the most popular shows in the cohort that got boosted right after the Promised Day, all but rolled out by the Ministry of Culture itself in order to mitigate some of the serious public pissiness a statewide alchemical disaster causes. Ed feels he and Al are not qualified to voice an opinion on that broader subject, mostly because they spend at least an hour after every episode ranting about every single alchemical inaccuracy, inconsistency and impossibility, and also how Azine and Dr. Loveless are totally fucking wrong for each other. 

Everyone here agrees about _that,_ at least, even if half the kids are convinced it should’ve been Dr. Avel instead of Maire. “You’re just saying that because they switched the voice actor,” some girl with a bob cut accuses the most vocal of the Avel faction. “We all _know_ you have a crush on that soldier show motherfucker -“

 _“Eastern Justice_ is not a soldier show! It’s about a _private detective -“_

Ed knows what the guy’s talking about, even if he hadn’t realized the voice actor changed off _Eastern Justice_ (because Avel is boring and stiff and has such a high opinion of himself that he doesn't even bother checking his patients' records to see if there's any chance of his cutting-edge treatments interacting with their homebrew remedies and turning them into a vegetable, _unlike Maire)_ . _Eastern Justice_ is actually a good show, too - good enough to have had like five different run-ins with the censors in the past two years alone, managing to stay on air through a combination of massive popularity and the writers toeing the line by having all the undesirable characters die horribly slash rightfully by the end of the arc.

Which is more or less why Al doesn’t like it, which is why Ed doesn’t really listen to it much anymore, not unless it’s already on somewhere at a cafe or in the university common rooms or whatever. The talk turns more fully to dissecting _Justice’s_ latest plotline, and Al toasts Ed with his drink, wiggles Mei’s in an explanatory way and slips off. Ed’s all set to follow him, only they’d migrated to opposite sides of the group and right then the girl immediately to Ed’s right says, “I can’t fucking believe they called the Wepo Depo the _Western Bank Police Deputy Commissioner’s Plaza_ -” and like hell can Ed leave a tiny insane crazy regionalism nitpick alone. 

His accent has smoothed enough that he mostly really does sound city East, and he knows the metro area well enough to join forces with a couple of other East-voiced girls and rant expansively about how stupid the whole mystery drownings plotline was and how you could tell when the writing team was swapped around because those episodes always went from street-level knowledge (“The fried chickpea vendor -” Ed yells, half overlapping with the bucktoothed girl’s “- on Plaza Four!”) to completely fucking forgetting that East _is built on a river._

“And there _is_ no secondary garrison detachment in the city, all the outposts outside the main base are outside city limits,” the bucktoothed girl concludes disgustedly. “There’s a whole barracks complex and munitions dump that got built during the civil war, it’s still in use. _That’s_ where the main freight yards are. You can fuckin’ tell that writer’s from Central.” 

“That, and how none of them will touch the whole aftermath in the East plotline,” a guy with double braids says. “Though maybe just because Central writers cost more and they have no budget left over for the soundscape stuff. I heard making all those group scenes and all the alchemy sound effects is expensive.” 

“As if anybody’s even touched anything close to that kind of story ever since Mustang got appointed,” snorts a guy with square glasses, because talking about _Eastern Justice_ leads to talking about politics leads immediately to talking about Mustang. Of course. “Everybody’s too chickenshit to try it until someone else does it first and they can see how he’ll jump.” 

“And nobody’s gonna be raring to go first anytime soon,” another kid with an actual tie says sardonically. Ed glances around; as the conversation turned from _Diagnosis Critical_ the group demographics similarly shifted, into worse haircuts and stiffer outfits. Law maybe? Polisci? “Why wait for a censorship crackdown? The Steelcorp trial is next week.” 

The Steelcorp trial. Ed has to hold in a groan. The initial farce of some moron trying to kill Mustang has spun out into a whole big thing, and now that the trial is coming up the papers and the radio won’t fucking shut up about it again. Ed cannot fucking believe that the bastard has managed to turn _petsitting_ into a national fucking conversation, even if he has, officially, said “no comment” to any question regarding the rumors of him keeping mammoth snake chimeras and thus ensured that everyone in the country thinks his house is infested with them. Sure, that’s _one_ way to no-cost up security, but at some point the rumors go from fucking funny as hell to just another barb in the sharkskin suit of Mustang’s reputation.

And it is _so_ fucking weird hearing people talk about Mustang. Extremely funny, sometimes, but mostly just surreal. Ed realized recently that keeping his fucking mouth shut whenever Mustang comes up has given him a reputation as _apolitical,_ of all things, just because he knows that if he opines in any way on the subject it’ll out him immediately as someone who’s spent way too much fucking time in direct contact with the bastard. Al thinks this is the funniest fucking thing in the world, of course, and expresses this mostly by sipping on whatever’s in his glass and making hard eye contact like he can transcribe the diatribe running through Ed’s head down to the expletives. This at least keeps the monologues internal, because hey, Al pretty much _can_ hear it, which is basically like getting to say it aloud anyway.

But Al’s off with Mei right now, so Ed just has to really concentrate on fishing the slippery bits of fruit out of his glass and stare with all the vacancy of a gym-haunting meatmonster if anybody looks too hard at him. Which nobody is, because nobody in this group knows him personally and between his fruit cup and the bucktoothed girl’s increasingly expansive gestures he’s half obscured from the conversation anyway. 

“I still can’t believe it was Mustang,” a guy with a quiff or maybe just a comatose ferret ass up on his head is saying. “Of all people. What was Grumman thinking?” 

“He was thinking hey, I’ll put up Mustang, he’ll follow orders and we were _‘chess buddies’_ back in East. And now the fucker thinks he can do _politics,”_ the bucktoothed girl says disgustedly, folding her arms. “That fucking stunt with the budget was just dickwaving, pure and simple - he wouldn’t go to the Aerugan front, oh no, but he’s the _Hero of Ishval_ and wants everyone to remember it. What a cock. It’s assholes like him that make everybody think Amestris is full of psychopaths.” 

Ed doesn’t know what’s funnier, the idea of Mustang sucking dick for promotion or _Grumman_ actually _wanting him to._ “I dunno, they _did_ try to kill him,” some other girl says doubtfully. “I mean, my dad says he should stick to soldiering too, but like…”

“Stick to _soldiering?_ Are you joking? Mustang’s with the fucking nationalizers, he’s _been_ with them, they got to him probably even before the eclipse! Nobody wants to up and say he’s having an affair with Jenness because _that’ll_ up and fuck you, but everyone can see he’s just doing whatever the fuck she tells him -“

“He doesn’t give a fuck about the _nationalizers,_ he’s just being the same fucking dickswinging asshole he always was. You heard that whole thing, he went out and did that press conference _specifically_ to make a whole big deal about how he’s ‘not satisfied’ -” 

“He just held that because he couldn’t not address whether there even _was_ a murder attempt, not with every damn talkshow bringing it up - did you see the cartoon the Sun did?” 

“- my _point_ is, Fian **,** is that he’ll go after _anybody_. He’s fucking telling people, hey, fuck with me, your whole fucking family gets copped -” 

“Okay, hey, no, he had a point though,” someone else says. “The guy was just some hired gun, he was just doing it for the money. What, you want Mustang to hang the poor idiot who’ll take baron money ‘cuz there ain’t shit else around, but not the actual baron? And _that_ guy _didn’t_ get hung, he took a plea deal and sold everybody out -” 

“ - uh, like life in a labor camp is _better,_ especially with the barons now after _his_ head too -” 

“And their whole families _didn’t_ get copped! My mom’s in the same bookclub as Khvan Morrow and his wife’s the district magistrate, and he said they were waiting for the full seizure orders but they never came - and _no,_ they didn’t just get blackwritten, people’ve seen the families around town and he said the houses weren’t even under guard.” 

“That’s not the fucking point! Who cares about the gunman? Mustang probably just set the whole thing up himself, decided he wanted Steelcorp out of the way and gave himself an excuse to go after them and hang them all out to dry -”

“Are you kidding me? Now the _whole_ steel belt hates his fucking guts, which is _not_ gonna help him any, and if you think he’s such a fuckin’ mastermind you’re telling me he did that to himself on _purpose -”_

“Are _you_ kidding me? Those Steelcorp guys screwed _everybody_ over! They tried to _assassinate a military officer._ Now _everybody_ who's even _walked_ past a Steelcorp building is on a watchlist, and both the Justice _and_ War Ministries have grounds to shut the whole fucking sector down and seize _all_ the production if they feel like it! They can say they’re investigating for collusion, _which they have cause for,_ and if they find so much as a misfiled paper they can chop off everybody above foreman level, rehire all the factory workers as state employees and pay them from the same damn funds as before, only now the profit goes straight to the federal treasury.”

“That’s what I’m _saying -_ Mustang probably set up the whole thing just for that -” 

“- and _all of that would've happened_ even if they _did_ kill Mustang, you _turnip._ The other generals might not like him but they _can’t_ not retaliate, because if they _didn’t_ that sends the message that you can _kill a state official_ and _get away with it.”_

“You think Mustang set himself up to maybe die just to nationalize the steel industry?” 

“No! I’m saying the whole _thing_ was a setup, the hitman _and_ the Steelcorp guys are both patsies - do you know how many people would love to fuck Mustang over? Almost as many as those who want to fuck _Steelcorp._ It was probably one of the -“

“It was the Armstrongs.” 

“What?” 

“Think about it. They own half the mines in Amestris, more than anyone else other than the actual state, _and_ practically the whole family’s military. Guess who they sell ore to? That’s right. And General Armstrong’s never quiet about how much she fucking hates Mustang, what’s the skin off _her_ nose to hire a hitman and pin it on Steelcorp? Like Mailan said, they’d have grounds to nationalize production whether Mustang lives or dies, and if he _did_ get killed for her it’s just a bonus -” 

“You saying _Armstrong’s_ a nationalizer?”

“She doesn’t have to be, that’s the point. That whole family plays both sides of the fence on purpose. No matter which way it goes they still win. It’s all rigged.” 

“Can we fucking focus? My _point_ is that Mustang’s firing shots - no, shut up, I don’t _care_ if it was the Armstrongs, nobody’s got any proof, the _point_ is that the nationalizers are making moves, and they’ve put _Mustang_ up as their masthead. As messages go it’s not _subtle._ Just fucking watch what happens next. Those poor Steelcorp guys are just the tip of the knife.” 

“What _is_ gonna happen to them?” someone asks, a little uncertainly. “Like, okay, their families haven’t been taken in or whatever - what’s happening to the guys they did take?”

“They’re gonna be executed.”

“Yeah, execution. Attempted murder, state official, military officer - like Janna said, there’s an incentive there for them to slap on everything all the way up to full treason. So, execution.”

“Yeah. I mean, unless Mustang _specifically_ intervenes -”

“Bets on _that_ happening.” Laughter all around. 

Ed lets bucktoothed girl’s hair obscure him completely, sliding him further to the outer edges of the group. He’s pretty sure he’s the only one here aware that Mustang isn’t some cackling cartoon villain, but. Ed wouldn’t take that bet. Ling had two attempts on his life in the single month Ed spent at the Imperial court, and both times the assassins were also executed, publicly, after equally public interrogation. Ling’s mom - a tiny, plump, salt-and-pepper-haired lady who was always smiling and waving servants over to share snacks - had personally given the orders, before the Inner City. Ling did not contradict her. 

“In cases such as these, mercy does not only endanger my son, Honored Princess,” Zhiqi Yao said - primarily to Mei, though not so subtly to Ed and Al with her, because they hadn’t been able to hide that they weren’t exactly thrilled with the results. “It risks everyone who protects him. If we do not make an example of those who attempt such bloody acts - if we do not make the risk greater than the potential reward - our people will know that we do not defend them. They will know that we are happy to throw away their lives and their loyal service for the sake of traitors and criminals.” She’d swept her fancy embroidered sleeves out, gesturing at the masked and hooded guards stationed around the room. “For it is our own beloved retainers who jump in the way of the blade, and take the blows meant for us, protecting us with their very lives. Deng Jun. Cao Lan Fan. Cao Xie. Cao Wei. Deng Zhang Min. Do we not owe them nothing less than the wholest commitment of our hearts, and the fullest extension of our power?”

Mei had silently bowed. Ed and Al had bowed with her. They didn’t like it. They understood. 

Mustang’s in that boat too, now. Khozhaq and Peters and Anje and Parles. Havoc. Hawkeye. They’ll die for him, if it comes to it. 

Ed doesn’t have to like it. Though maybe he should kick Mustang’s door in and tell him to hurry up and outlaw the death penalty. The fucking firing squad executions, at least. They aren’t _better_ than hanging. And the labor camps too, while he’s at it. It’s not like anything those kids were saying about the hitman is fucking _wrong._

“Besides, what can you fucking expect? Grumman might talk a big game about armistice and alliance with Creta, but he appointed _Mustang._ To head the _War Ministry,”_ someone continues, as Ed wonders whether now is a prudent time to go top up his compote with hundred proof afterburner. “Chess buddies or not. Even _Bradley_ called Mustang the god of war in those fucking speeches, and Bradley gave us _Ishval._ Which, incidentally, is where Mustang got all his medals, and he got _those_ by fucking torching little kids -“

“Uh, okay, let’s not go pretending the Ishvalans were helpless little babies who just lay there and took it,” some other kid says sharply. “My whole family had to move to East and then to _Central_ out of Listenbool, because East was getting bombed and Listenbool _isn’t there anymore_ . And it wasn’t _Mustang_ who did that -” 

“Oh my god, can we go _one_ fucking day without talking about Ishval? Just _one_ day? Like, one party, that’s all I’m asking -“

“Oh, go and join the censorship office, Fian, if you’re so fucking hot on that -“

“All _I’m_ saying is, don’t be surprised if those Steelcorp families _do_ get blackwritten down the line, when nobody’s paying attention, because like Mailan said, Jenness bringing on Mustang is a fucking message, and in any case her fucking cartel has the whole Justice ministry all sewn up -” 

Ed lets the circle close him out completely. He wants to say, _he’s not that bad._ He wants to say, _if you think it’s ever someone else running Mustang’s show then you have no fucking clue what’s going on._ He wants to say, _when he fucks up he owns it. He sets himself to fixing it, and he never stops, he never gives up for a second._ He wants to say, _he’s actually a skinny little twink under that boxy uniform, and he punches like a rabbit, and if he heard you talk all that to his face he’d smile and eat it all up and if he thought any of it was particularly good he’d use it in his next batch of rumors, because it’s not about him, he_ knows _it’s not about him, and he’s going to do what it takes to get the job done._

But Ed’s not taking himself down that road, and has no business there anyway. It’s not his job to defend Mustang. The bastard wouldn’t thank him if he did. It’s not like there _is_ a defense. Ed may have fucked up, but Mustang _fucked up._ To own a sin so big, wide as a country, deep as a culture - when Ed thinks about it, his knees have to lock. It’s heavier than anything Ed’s ever come _close_ to carrying. For all that Mustang’s a bastard, he has never once flinched away from the weight. 

When Ed realized that, he knew that no matter how much he grew, there would always be a part of him that’s looking up at Mustang. 

But thinking about this shit is a fast way to nosedive his own evening, so Ed decides a repeat pilgrimage to the drinks table is in order. And maybe he is apolitical, he thinks sardonically as he sloshes juice into a glass. Not like he can say he’s done anything more _political_ in the past five years than fuck Ling. And then not fuck Ling. Like sure, okay, punching the shit out of that fucking fathercloning wannabe god thing on the eclipse probably counts as political enough to ring him up a decent line of credit in that bank, but it’s not like that significantly improved things. It just stopped them from getting a lot worse. 

Not that that’s _Ed’s_ job. Mustang needs to hurry the fuck up and complete his people-I’ve-got-by-the-balls collection so that he can really floor the pedal on changing shit. 

Ed’s right arm picks then to do one of its fun little muscle spasms, but thankfully it’s small enough and he’s quick enough this time that he barely spills anything before managing to switch hands. He’s tempted to be a lot less generous with the juice than the vodka, but being drunk-drunk is annoying and last month at one of Landy’s friends’ parties he’d sat down to pee and then spent ten minutes stuck in the bathroom because he lost the ability to find his underwear inside his pants due to them both being black. This was hilarious but also a solid barometer of how stupid being yomped makes him, and under these circumstances a finger of liquor is liable to send him back to those law kids to pick a fight on who the fuck else they think is ready to change shit, if Mustang’s too much for them to choke down. 

“Hey dummy,” Win says right in Ed’s ear, making him yip and jump. “Quit makin’ faces at the drinks and come dance with me.”

“Win! Let me _drink_ my drink, fuck.” Ed lets her tow him out of the kitchen, occasionally staggering around people scattered by her like sailboats in a battleship’s wake. 

“Who cares about your drink? You’re at a _party,_ you’re here to _socialize._ What happened to mister big man, mister oh I have so many friends, you won’t be able to move for how many real alive friends I’m gonna show you -“

“Hey! I _told_ you - oh! Hey! Right there!” Ed disengages from Win to wave an arm. “Landy!” 

“Ed!” 

Landy goes to them immediately, all smiley and unaware that Ed’s about to throw her at Win headfirst. He sees it’s Al she was talking to - Landy’s stepdad breeds sugarpoint cats, so it only took Landy coming over once for her and Al to forge a blood bond unbreakable by time nor force - and he drifts over too, clearly as aware of Winry’s inexorable friendlust as Landy isn’t. “Hi Ed!” she says happily. “Who’s your friend?”

“Hi, yeah - here, this is Winry. Landy, Winry,” Ed says, waving a hand between the two of them. “Win - Landy did seven years of ballet with a teacher who had a Strussli leg. Landy - Win’s won the Rush Valley lindy hop flop three years in a row,” and it’s not even a full minute before they’re marching for the sitting room off the kitchen doing duty as a makeshift dancefloor. Ed loves girls. They’re so efficient.

“Hey,” Al says, as Win starts gently but firmly pushing the vaguely gyrating drunk kids apart to make herself some room. “Mei and I are probably going to leave in a little bit, with some of my friends.”

“Huh? What? Are you done?” Ed spins in place, staring at Al, then looking around the room; he can’t see any of the guppy squad, but Mei’s pretty clearly waiting by the front hall where they came in. “Where’s your kids? Piranhas get them after all?” 

“No, Eddie C. got a new telescope last week. We’re gonna go stargazing,” Al says. “We were always going to go, it’s just we decided we could also come to the party first. There’s supposed to be a starshower tonight around twelve forty five.” 

“What? Where? Fucking nerds,” Ed blurts, as if that doesn’t sound interesting as hell and he isn’t instantly and all-consumingly jealous. A quick look across the room tells him Win is not leaving that fucking dancefloor. “How long’s it gonna last? Where are you going? Are you gonna come back?”

“Eddie has keys to the Atrium roof, so we were gonna go up there,” Al says, doubling Ed’s envy with one sentence. “He also lives in the grad apartments over on that side of campus, so I was gonna sleep over.”

“Arghh, okay, go, go,” Ed says, tugging Al in for a hug and then waving him off. “Tell me how it went, have fun, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” 

“That’s a much longer list than you want people to think it is,” Al says, patting his shoulder. “Make good choices.”

Ed lets him go, watching him pick up a ragged corona of med students the way that suns catch wayward comets before linking arms with Mei as they head out. Fuck, checking out a starshower would be really cool. Maybe he really should put more effort into making Al’s friends think he’s a little less of a demon. 

He watches Landy and Winry dance for a bit, laughing as they spin around, pausing occasionally to switch leads or step to the side, demonstrate a bit of footwork. He’s smugly pleased to have proved at least one college friend both extant and worthwhile to Winry, but doing so has left him down two friends. He could go find McKenna and Brinley and the rest, they’re definitely here somewhere, but. He doesn’t want to drink more and he doesn’t really want to go find a conversation. The only person he’d want to dance with right now is Winry, and she’s busy getting flipped over Landy’s shoulder in a perfect slingshot aerial. The room is still loud, Ed can tell, but the sound isn’t close; the heat of bodies and booze drifted back while he wasn’t paying attention, sensation not quite touching him. 

Sometimes, if he pauses in the wrong moment, the surreality feeling slips, becomes unreality, becomes a world a little bit too consequence-free. It’s not a state he has so far been able to anticipate, avoid or talk himself out of. After all, he can’t lie to himself: he _knows_ what real stakes are. What real choices are. What does it matter whether he goes to school or to parties, takes this class or that one, if he overturns this table, smashes all the drinks on the floor? A little mess, a little fuss. What’s it actually going to do? 

It _does_ matter, he knows that. This is a real fucking life. It’s just in some moments, some places, he cannot feel it. 

There is a solution, though. Best way to get out of it is to feel something else. And if Al’s gone and Win’s busy, Ed’s just gonna have to entertain himself. 

He steps out the kitchen side door into the yard, breathing in the warm night air. It’s not exactly _fresher,_ because everybody’s smoking like chimneys out here, but there’s a big overgrown garden full of aromatic bushes probably old as the house itself and between the shisha and the flowers it at least doesn’t smell like horseshit. There’s a skip-stone garden path in the muddy grass, leading past a woodpile and some sheds to the backyard; Ed heads down there, only to startle when an irregular shape moves by the wood, almost struggling. Ed nearly whacks it before he realizes that it’s just two people making out - and that it’s the kid with the side part and the biker he was mooning at: they’re clamped around each other like a couple of fighting lampreys, sucking face with all the power of a virgin discovering their first consequence-free hookup. 

“Xin hun kuai le,” Ed mutters under his breath, resisting the urge to clap the kid’s shoulder as he edges past. It should cheer him up, and it does, a little, to see the great success of his grand plan of Apply Alcohol, but mostly it reminds him of all the times Lan Fan and Jun would say it when they found _him_ getting fun with somebody in some corner. 

Assholes. He needs to mail them something really offensively tackily Amestrisan soon. 

He continues around to the back of the house, letting his metal foot fall a little more heavily out here where it won’t ring out of step in the dirt, relaxing it just enough to feel the drag on his port. An answering ghost echo flickers in his shoulder, reminding him - he hasn’t slept up these past years, couldn’t have dreamed them, isn't sleepwalking now. 

The backyard is also full of people, clustered drinking around a firepit and spread out smoking among the benches and lawn chairs of the back deck. That’s where he finds Ponytail: sat with some other biker guys and a couple of random kids around a qalyan. 

Perfect. Ponytail’s eyes go straight to him, too, which saves time. 

“Hey,” Ed greets him, holding the eye contact as he takes a sustained sip of his drunk juice. “Wanna go over there and… check out some bushes?”

Ponytail hands off the qalyan pipe and stands up without a word. Ed grins approvingly and heads for the garden.

The guy catches him around the waist as they step off the lawn, pressing them chest to back and bending down to move Ed’s hair aside and kiss his neck. Ed approves highly of this behavior, so he tilts his head and lets it slow them down, doing that awkward slightly side-to-side walk of two people trying to move four legs. The garden proves to be very much between caretakers as they shuffle further in, but Ed doesn’t mind - between the guy and his black outfit and the branches whacking his legs it’s reminding him of all the times he got bark scrapes on his face from getting railed in the woods by GreedLing. 

They finally hit a fence, after ducking through enough growth that the noise of the party is slightly muted and they aren’t at risk of any surprise exhibitionism. The guy stays at his back, nosing his neck and rubbing up his chest, and that feels good enough that Ed doesn’t notice they’ve stepped maybe a little bit too far into a massive wisteria cluster, where the open ground space does not translate into a lack of branches at face height. 

“Good looking little thing, aren’t you?” Ponytail murmurs, because _he’s_ protected from all the twigs by way of all of them stabbing into _Ed._

“Yeah, uh huh - listen, hey,” Ed starts, but then he gets distracted when a wisteria branch almost goes up his nose. This lets Ponytail drag his hands around the waistband of Ed’s pants, toying with the belt; then he pauses. “Hel-lo,” Ponytail says interestedly, plucking at the small of Ed’s back - oh, he’s found a knife. “What’s this?”

“Just leave it, it’ll stay with the belt,” Ed says distractedly, trying not to inhale petals, only then Ponytail takes Ed’s chin in his hand and turns it to kiss him. 

So far Ed hasn’t been totally sold on the whole kissing thing. As, like, a practice, if not the concept. He’s pretty sure it’s not that he’s been kissing the wrong people or that they were bad at it or anything, because it seems statistically unlikely that _everyone_ is that bad at it. It’s just that it seems like most everybody likes doing stuff at Ed finds, well. Gross. Tasting what someone else had for dinner is seriously not what he wants out of mouth contact. Even Winry - they kissed way more on the cheek or neck or tits than the mouth when they were together, but Win did tell him that it was kind of an acquired preference, and, well. She _had_ succeeded in acquiring it. Ed’s halfway resigned to having to acquire it too, because sure seems like everyone fuckin’ else boarded that train and isn’t getting off anytime soon. 

Ponytail is no exception, which means Ed gets a mouthful of beer and tobacco - the strong, bitter stuff, not the fruity maassel that’s in all the student pipes. At least he doesn’t stay on long, moves to Ed’s neck again, and in between that and the damn _bushes_ and trying not to spill his drink Ed doesn’t have a chance to do his usual introductory demo before Ponytail’s hand starts rubbing over his crotch. 

His cunt isn’t exactly a national secret, but it’s not information he owes anybody who isn’t T-minus ten seconds from finding out on their own anyway, so he does generally have to introduce the downstairs situation like a realtor revealing a remodeled specialty basement. Ponytail doesn’t seem to notice for a moment, just rubbing between Ed’s legs, then does a sort of pause-and-shuffle as his hand goes less exploratory and more seeking for something that isn’t there. Ed would take over the general tour at this point, only he’s busy fighting off the godsdamned vengeance of the wood here so Ponytail’s on his fucking own. This one branch just will _not -_ stay _wedged -_ out of the _way -_

Ponytail finally pauses. “Oh. You’re…” 

“Yup,” Ed grunts, shoving leaves out of his face and widening his stance a bit to give Ponytail’s hand more room, because he’s a big believer in multitasking. “Well? Keep goin’.”

“Shit,” Ponytail breathes. It sounds appreciative. “That’s hot.”

Ed allows it, because Ponytail’s bringing his other palm down and it’s good, none of the can-I-may-I what-are-you-into shit, just confident hands getting straight to the point. “You’re so hot,” he repeats. “Fuck, that’s so hot -” 

“You don’t have to keep telling me,” Ed says, vaguely annoyed but mostly preoccupied with pushing the one incredibly insistent branch away without actually breaking it. “It’s not fuckin’ news here.” He finally succeeds in trapping it behind other, less aggressive branches and turns around, briefly knocking Ponytail’s hands off. “Alright! Get your dick out.”

The cock is very promising, at least: Ed fishes a condom out of his back pocket and gets in some good groping as he rolls it on, enjoying the weight in his hand. The guy’s definitely the type to try to keep kissing him if they do this face to face, though, so Ed pushes his own pants down, turns around and spreads his legs, tossing a grin back over his shoulder. “Like this.”

“Yeah,” the guy breathes, stepping forward and grabbing Ed’s hips again. “Yeah, oh fuck yeah.” He seems pretty happy to just rub his dick between Ed’s cheeks for a bit, though, so Ed takes a swig of his drink, brings his free hand down, pushes his ass back and fishes around until he gets the correct handful: cock, hello, meet pussy, let’s go. 

This is where the estrogen doodad and vaginas in general come in super useful: being able to make your own lube ain’t nothing to sneeze at. Testosterone is a hell of a drug, but being able to just slide right on in with just some friendly rubbing and a push is something Ed is not going to give up. Especially - as Ponytail shuffles them closer to the fence and another wisteria branch tries to get friendly - given his entertainment choices. Ed is not enough of a cargo pants person to support a non-self-lubing lifestyle. 

He braces his hand against the nearest fencepost, wiggling back to seat the cock in properly - Ponytail helpfully stabilizes the base - then takes enough of a gulp of his drink to bring the liquid level down from ‘don’t sneeze’ to ‘maybe not _immediately’_ spillable. “Alright. Have at it, big guy.” 

“What, you’re still drinking?” The guy laughs. “Alright, let’s see about that.” 

The problem, Ed identifies pretty much immediately, is that the guy has taken him as some kind of penile challenge. It’s admittedly the downside of fucking older dudes. Ed has not fallen over himself to slobber his manpole, so now the guy has to Show Him What For. With his dick. Now, Ed is all about being shown what for, he’s absolutely a fan, but generally that sort of thing only works when you can actually back it up. There’s certainly a lot of bouncing and jostling going on, but if Ed’s main concern is whether that vine climbing up the fencepost of his handhold is poison ivy then maybe the guy’s not quite up to the task. 

Ed should probably do something about it. Fucking standing up gives him shit leverage when he’s the one taking it, though, which is a major downside of the position and especially apparent when it’s clear this guy’s most helpful contribution would be on his back with his arms by his sides and his dick available for the riding. Ed entertains himself for a bit with trying to finish his drink without spilling from the thrusting, but even that only lasts as long as the drink does. 

He tries to decide whether he even wants to make himself come or not. On the one hand, no orgasm = no point, so if he doesn’t come then he’s just letting Ponytail crash test his asscheeks for no goddamn reason. On the other hand, he came twice today already, so it’s not like he’s jonesing, and if he really wants it later he can take care of it himself. He’d take care of it himself _now,_ only they’ve got a limited set of options when it comes to switching positions here and no way Ed’s taking his pants all the way off. Or getting down on the ground. He’s had enough mud in his hair for a lifetime. Maybe if Ponytail traps him up against the fence, grinds his face in it a little? But his eye socket and jaw are still kinda tender from when that rugby guy was knocking his head against the floorboards in the athletic equipment storage room last week. Which, come to think of it, hadn’t been very satisfying either. Fuck, is he getting sick of _sex?_ No, that can’t be it, he _did_ come with Winry just a couple of hours ago. 

Win knows how to work him, though. Maybe it’s just that these guys aren’t working with a full complement of operational intelligence, and Ed isn’t invested enough to teach them. It’s not, like, _bad,_ the guy’s still going at him like Armstrong pounding concrete in a practice quarry, and the friction’s fine, it’s just fucking repetitive and not going to make him come. 

This is disappointing, though. The whole point of _getting_ fucked is that you _get fucked._ When Greed or Ling felt Ed getting bored they’d pick him up or force him down on his knees or roll out the carbon armor and _make_ him pay attention. 

Then, like the guy heard him, there’s a sharp tug on Ed’s scalp: Ponytail’s grabbed himself a fistful of hair. 

Another downside of fucking strangers, Ed thinks grimly as he snaps his free hand back around Ponytail’s wrist: they don’t know what’ll get them bit. “Not the hair,” he says aloud, letting both tone and grip indicate he means business. 

He feels the fingers loosen, hand slowly opening under his hold. His hair slithers back down over his shoulders. “Alright, man,” Ponytail says, sounding almost wary for a second. “No harm done.”

Ed grunts in acknowledgment and pushes back with his hips, indicating that Ponytail should get on with it. After a second, he does, if somewhat slower than before. Which doesn’t actually improve anything. Does he have to do everything himself? Typically Ed likes to reward initiative, but the fact that Ponytail went for his hair first isn’t making him inclined to allow extra credit. 

Why is he even fucking this guy. Okay, he knows why, it’s not exactly a fuckin’ mystery. Wait. Shit. Does he have a Xingese dude fetish? Is this a problem? Ed mentally tallies up the men he’s fucked in the past twelve months, finds the Xingese percentage and concludes that numerically it may be a problem. Does he need to do something about it? What the hell would fixing that even look like? Some kind of desensitization-related cock and ball torture? Is there even a vagina equivalent for that? He and Winry tried that stuff with the clothespins a couple times, but he wouldn’t exactly call that _torture._ Or desensitization. He could use a few clothespins here right now, in fact. Also, in potential Xingese racial fetish calculations he should probably account for how five of those twelve months he was fucking in Xing. That’s definitely skewing the data some. Yeah, okay, he’s definitely not coming tonight. 

He also has a feeling Ponytail is one of those guys who thinks that insisting they be allowed to make their partner come is some kind of chivalry thing. Ed doesn’t have all night here, so his options are to fake it or deal with whatever Ponytail decides is the correct response to sexual dissatisfaction. 

Ed’s never faked an orgasm before. Could be fun to try. Though with his acting skills it might just make the guy think he needs a Heimlich maneuver. And honestly, it’s not like it’s _hard_ to make Ed come. Is this guy even trying? He hasn’t even reached for Ed’s clit once, he realizes in outrage, despite the fact that if he had Ed probably would’ve knocked his hand away and taken over himself. 

Very abruptly everything flips over from tolerable and vaguely annoying to fucking _infuriating,_ and that slice of rage down his spine is Ed’s signal to do something before it all hazes out and the only thing he cares about is putting this guy’s face through the fenceboards in front of him. “Right, that’s it,” Ed says, letting go of the fence, twisting and stepping forward to push Ponytail out of him and knocking him back a step. Ponytail looks taken aback, but when Ed orders, “Back against the fence,” slugging down the dregs of his drink and wedging the cup in the nearest fork of the wisteria - he does it. 

Ed grabs him by the shoulders - Ponytail’s breath leaves him in an _oof -_ and after some annoying fucking around with the clothes - pants are great except for when they’re _stupid -_ he clamps his legs around Ponytail’s hips and pushes himself back onto his cock. 

Ponytail grunts, a punched-out kick of breath against Ed’s neck that turns into a gasp as Ed levers himself up again. Ponytail’s not strong enough to take Ed’s full weight, but that’s fine, Ed is, and using the fence as primary leverage works great, even if Ponytail now sounds like he’s being dragged backwards through the bushes Ed spent all this time guerilla landscaping. This close Ed can smell leather and some kind of wood soap under the tobacco, and that’s nice, good enough to counterbalance the general eau de party, which is honestly one of the least sexy scents to fuck to despite being one of the most convenient.

There was this one freightworker Ed saw for a couple nights at this bar out in Roan, and that guy was big enough to just bounce him, which was physically hilarious and gave him the neon edge of thrill that came with _this could really hurt me._ Of course, for the entire week after he’d had weird sex dreams about Darius _and_ Heinkel, vivid enough that he felt he should probably call them up and apologize, but the point is that this position can really work, in the right situation, as opposed to just feeling like work. This is not one of those situations. He is, however, probably redeeming himself in the eyes of McKenna, who was not thrilled earlier when she found out he was missing a conditioning practice to pick up Winry.

Ed speeds up a bit, clenches down, bares teeth in Ponytail’s face, and that does the trick: the guy comes, gruntily, fingers digging into Ed’s hips. Afterwards he seems a bit too inclined to just hang out with his face tucked damply into Ed’s neck, but given that his biceps aren’t anything to write home about it only takes a casual wiggle for Ed to disengage and hop down without seeming overly eager.

Ponytail flicks some hair out of his eyes, breathing ragged, still mostly slumped against the fence. “What’s your name?” 

“Hey! _Ed!”_

And _that’s_ Winry, thank fuck. _“I know you’re out here, Ed!_ Hurry up and come back inside, Landy wants us to show her how to do the double slide!”

“Gotta go!” Ed says brightly, hiking his pants up with a hop and patting briskly at Ponytail’s chest. “That was, you know, anyway -“

_“Ed!”_

“See ya!”

Ed slithers out of the bushes and makes for the deck, determinedly not allowing the general disarray of his briefs to hinder his stride as he slips past Winry with her hands on her hips and a crossly expectant look on her face. “Ed!”

“Bathroom!” Ed returns, and pounds upstairs to find one that won’t have a line ten people deep. 

Five minutes later he’s back downstairs and as cleaned up as a communal horse house bathroom sink can get him, which is clearly five minutes more than Win would’ve liked, but she just wrinkles her nose at him in routine judgment of his sexual inadvisability and marches him to the main room. “This is a little slow,” Win says, circling a finger in the air and snapping at the pilfered loudspeaker as Ed starts pushing chairs off to the side with his foot. “Hey! Bret! Turn on something more - you got the Blackwell Band?”

Bret or a compatriot bullroars an affirmative, followed shortly by Two Left Feet starting to blare somewhat honkily over the speaker. It’s the fastest song on the album and thus Winry’s favorite, which means Ed’s about to get a full fucking workout in the span of two minutes forty and is frankly fucking ideal. 

Maybe he should stop just fucking people, he thinks, as he steps onto the floor and Win immediately drops back into his arm, knowing he’ll catch her, anchoring automatically over his left shoulder because she knows his right is temperamental still. Maybe he should try the dating shit for real. Figure out what he wants to do with Fullmetal, whether to bring him out of limbo or bury him for keeps. Decide whether he wants to stick with the civil engineering shit or hell, just fuck off to Creta after university. If he wants to get a degree at all. 

Well, he’ll see. He’s got time. Nothing but time, nothing but whatever he wants, for the rest of his life. Hooray. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> edward elric, congenitally a pillow princess even when he’s actively topping


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this ch is unbetad so will probably change when i wake up and do edits in post. God im tired

Between Winry and Landy and the Blackwell Band Ed dances a solid hour, because once people see he can lift even Win over his head a bunch of other girls want a turn. He finally taps out once his thigh really starts to throb and he can feel sweat actively sliding into the port juncture, staggering off back to the bathroom to gulp down water from the tap and get his hair in some kind of order. 

He’s definitely done for the night and gets going to convince Winry that she is also, but there’s a girl sitting at the top of the stairs blocking his way. She twists around to look at him, making Ed stop; a lot of people come to the horse parties, but one of the kids that lurk in the back of his poetry classes trying to give him a run for the money in the boots and belts department is not someone he expected to see here, and definitely not in a pastel sundress. 

“Aline?” he says. _“You’re_ here? And wearing… colors?”

Aline sighs from what sounds like somewhere pretty deep inside her soul. She’s missing all her piercings, too, just a pair of pearl studs left in her earlobes. “My last name’s Toville, Ed.”

Ed considers this, cross-references his memory, finds nothing, considers the possibility of error due to alcohol and concludes that whatever it is, he’s not getting any positive matches regardless. “Yes?”

“And my hair’s not naturally black.”

“O… kay?”

Aline sighs from somewhere even deeper. “Alright. Look at my face. Now imagine I’m blonde. And in a ponytail. And yell _point your toes, Elric_ a lot -”

“What!” Ed blurts, pointing stupidly at her as suddenly he sees it. “You - McKenna has a _sister?”_

Aline rolls her eyes. “A twin.”

“She never mentions it!”

“Neither do I,” Aline says dryly. “For obvious reasons.”

What obvious reasons? “But she’s your sister?”

Aline looks like she’s considering a third sigh but stands up instead, fixing the hem of her dress in a resigned sort of way. “Not everybody’s like you and Alphonse. Are you hiding from her up here?”

“Not really,” Ed says, deciding that if Aline wants to be weird and cryptic about her sister that’s her problem. “Haven’t seen her all night. I’m about to get my friend and go, though.” Then, because she looks like she’s just gonna sit right back down on the stairs like she’s missed the last bus out of Shithole, Wherever, he adds, “Wanna leave with us?”

“Gods yes,” Aline says immediately. “Tell McKenna I left with a boy.”

“What, me?” 

“Sure you. Why not?” 

“Fine, but only if you tell her we didn’t sleep together,” Ed stipulates as he starts down the stairs. “McKenna yells at me when I fuck people she knows.” 

“She only cares because it makes you _and_ another person late to practice,” Aline grumbles, which is unfair given Ed only ever made Camile late and only the once, and that was only because they’d accidentally gotten one of her dreads stuck in Ed’s zipper, which could have happened to anyone. “Though actually,” Aline says, in a thoughtful and suddenly too innocent tone, “can we say it was your brother instead?”

Ed’s about to say _Wow, didn’t know you wanted Xing to invade,_ but is saved by simultaneously spotting Winry and recalling just in time that as far as the average acquaintance is concerned Mei is just a languages student that Al met in the East. “Hey! Win!” he yells instead, figuring Aline can create and solve her own problems. “You wanna blow this donkey farm?” 

It takes a few more songs and some whining about his potential rash, but Win does. Landy decides to come with them, which is probably the best intersection of Ed’s two primary social groups given Aline isn’t one of the poetry people who can’t make eye contact and Landy is probably the nicest of the gymnasts besides Brinley, who would require a much stronger connection to reality to understand most insults, let alone craft his own. Probably fine with Winry too, given her whole approach to poems and fiction in general is about what you’d expect from someone whose idea of high art consists exclusively of things with cogwheels in them. 

“Wait,” Ed says as they gather to head out, remembering that one of Al’s nerdlets was busy getting busy with presumably one of Ponytail’s finest _after_ Al already left. “I gotta go find a guy.” 

“Oh! Brinley!” Landy says, like she’s just remembered she left her stove on. “Should we bring him too?” 

Probably. Ed’s pretty good at finding guys and more importantly has a finely tuned sense of where people hook up, so he finds mister nerdlet sex haver within five minutes, his bowtie gone and locked into some deeply glazed conversation with his biker. Ed convinces the kid to leave with them while Win writes her number on Bret or Brant or Trant or whoever’s arm, which really only works after Ed takes the marker from her, hands it to the biker and puts nerdlet’s hand front and center, all while trying not to look like he’s surreptitiously keeping an eye out for Ponytail. Ed’s already been around the ‘well, maybe the sex will be better _next_ time’ track with people he meets off the street, and he knows himself enough to recognize he’s not exactly going to be generous if they somehow get a round two. 

Brinley’s not hard to find, despite the fact that Ed hasn’t seen him even once tonight; they collect him by one of the really big beer kegs, predictably drunk as shit and cow-blinking for a solid five seconds in Landy’s face when she asks him if he wants to go home. That’s pretty much a yes whether he agrees or not, so Ed grabs his elbow and tows him in the right direction until they’re off the grounds and he can more or less stagger along with the group due to a lack of alternative options. 

The trolleys have stopped running, so by general consensus they head off towards the river. Following the canals is the easiest way to navigate when you don’t have a car; there aren’t _that_ many pedestrian access bridges, but you can climb down onto the overgrown maintenance tracks and hop across where there’s water locks. There’s a fence, but it’s old and saggy and they barely have to hop to climb over, letting them onto the damp canalside path. 

They’ve hardly been walking ten minutes - Ed forced into the position of loudly defending _Diagnosis Critical_ due to Winry and Aline both thinking it’s a shit show, not just a shitshow - when the beam of a flashlight sweeps over them from around the bend just ahead. “Halt,” a male voice calls. “Police.” 

Oh, great. Cops. They halt, though it’s a bit of a process given Brinley was bringing up the rear and new concepts like _stop_ and _go_ need to be introduced into his mental landscape with adequate care and lead time even without the presence of alcohol. Ed steadies him and Win both and tries not to squint into the oncoming flashlights; looks like only two officers. 

A second later a hand fumbles at the back of his belt. And then Winry detaches his knife, and chucks it sheath and all into the bushes without even looking.

_“Win!”_

“You’re not a state anything anymore, you don’t even carry ID, do you _want_ to give them a reason?” Winry hisses right in his ear. “They’re _cops.”_

“You need to spend less time with Paninya,” Ed swears, but at that point the cops are pretty much walking up to them. “And I do too carry ID.” 

“Evening, citizens,” says the first cop as they slow to a stop in front of them, hitching his hands in his belt. “What have we got here?” 

It’s not exactly original dialogue, but it’s not _hey you! Freeze!_ so Ed is willing to be magnanimous. “Evening,” he says, trying to channel Al’s usual talking-to-strangers voice. “Just on our way home.”

“This is state property,” the cop says, fairly mild. “That makes this -“ he gestures between them - “trespassing.”

“Sorry! We went off the path, we didn’t realize,” Win says, quick and sweet with a calculated bit of fluster, stepping closer to put herself on Ed’s shoulder in the Nice Girlfriend, Few Braincells (Oh No We’re _Both_ Silly variant). “We can get right back on the road, sorry!” 

“Trespassing’s trespassing. It’s a crime,” the cop says, clearly appreciating how Win’s tits are now halfway sandwiching Ed’s bicep even if it’s not motivating him to be anything but more condescending. “Ignorance of the law is no defence.” 

“And we can’t just ignore crimes,” the other cop says, putting his hands on his hips in a very schoolmarm fashion. “This town would be a real bad place, if we just went around ignoring crimes. So what are we going to do with you?” 

Wow. _Trespassing._ Two steps away from a god damn violent felony. Sometimes, Ed thinks, not without irony, he really misses being a State Alchemist. Some cops would turn up, he’d flash his watch, they’d back off no questions asked. Anybody with him was automatically considered his luggage. He was a problem everyone hoped was there to happen to someone else. 

Not anymore, though. As it is, he has to dig out his wallet with his non-sandwiched arm and cough up some cash. “Here,” he says, holding the bills out to the cop, knowing he sounds deeply sarcastic but not caring enough to do anything about it. “Let’s all have a nice night, yeah?”

The cop looks at the three fifties, takes them, then looks their group over again. “Attempting to bribe an officer? That’s a serious offense.” 

And he pockets the money. Oh, this _asshole._ “Is that not the going rate?” Ed says, trying not to talk through his teeth as Win not so subtly digs her fingers into his back. “Vodka prices gone up recently?”

“Gosh, wow. You a daytime comedian, sweetheart?” The cop grins mirthlessly, gesturing to his partner. “Line up, all of you. Hands on your head.” 

Ed tries not to sneer as he puts his hands up, mostly because Win’s glaring a combination of _behave_ and _I told you so!_ as she lines up, even politely setting her legs apart. The cop starts the patdown with her, though that’s probably less because of her indicating cooperation and more because her proto-shirt wasn’t at a hundred percent opacity even before she sweated it through dancing. 

This is so fucking stupid. It’s not even a real cop stop; they’re just gonna inconvenience them and let them go, though clearly not without extracting more cenz from all of them than they want to part with. The patdown cop takes his sweet time, moving on from a quietly exasperated Winry to a quivering nerdlet and a parade-rest straightbacked Aline as the other cop idly rifles through the wallets he pulled, not even pretending to check their ID. 

When patdown cop finishes Landy and straightens up to loom, Brinley flinches a bit, drunk enough that it comes on a delay and makes it even more noticeable. The cop grins like this is the best compliment ever and moves on to Ed. 

Ed stares dead ahead and focuses on counting the streetlights just visible up over the embankment so as not to give in to the temptation to flip this fuck into the bushes, send his partner after him and take off. The patdown is a joke: Ed can tell right away that the cop hasn’t even noticed he’s got automail, barely brushing a hand down his calf, and he’d call this whole thing an excuse to grope them only this guy is clearly more invested in intimidation than feeling them up. 

Or at least, feeling _Ed_ up. When the cop’s done he circles around them, and when he passes Brinley - who does his hair super carefully, and wears a lot of really tailored pants, and drunkenly confided to Ed once that he wants his first time to be with someone special - there’s a dull slap, and Brinley jerks hard, almost jumping forward as his eyes go wide. 

Later, Ed thinks that if he’d been all the way sober, he would’ve at least punched in the other direction. As it is, his fist slams the cop in the cheekbone, right under the temple, and topples him into the water. 

He used his right hand on reflex, which means he’s hissing and shaking his knuckles out as the splash sends them all scattering out of line. Landy squeals, Brinley lurches back with his mouth open, and Winry and the other cop all start shouting something, but Ed’s got his eyes on the foaming canal and how it’s not splashing around enough. There’s a nonzero chance he just knocked this cop out. Which means if he doesn’t get pulled out before he inhales water, he’s gonna drown.

“Oh, fuck me,” Ed says, and jumps in after. 

The canal isn’t that deep, but it’s night and it’s murky and the visibility is fucking zero. At least there’s not much of a current, which is a small fucking blessing given he’s basically guaranteed to contract _some_ kind of horrible bilge disease heretofore only found present in mutant rat populations. He seals his mouth tight and lets his leg sink him like a stone, touching his boots to the bottom, and a second later his seeking hand hits something flailing around in the water. 

It’s either the cop or a really _big_ sewer eel in full uniform, so Ed grabs goddamn Grabass here around an armpit and shoves up, kicking hard off the ground. Thank fuck he got all that practice swimming with his automail in Huacheng Qiao, because otherwise he’d be struggling even without two hundred pounds of asshole trying to concuss him with a lot of vigor that could really be put towards independent swimming. 

They breach the surface like a couple of angry beachballs, Ed heaving Grabass off him once it’s clear the asshole’s very much awake and mobile. There’s a lot of shouting going on, but Ed’s busy spitting as thoroughly as he can while searching for the quickest handholds up out of here. It’s not that hard to climb out via the nearest maintenance rungs, which unfortunately means that when he hauls himself up Grabass is right behind him. This must be what being chased by a hungry walrus is like, Ed thinks as he rolls out of the way of Grabass’ lurching swipe. 

Not that it really gets him anywhere: the dry cop’s trying to get past where Winry’s grabbed Landy like she’s keeping her from jumping in too, and the nerdlet is staring at them all with his mouth hanging open and his eyes bugging. Grabass’ incoherent bellowing is starting to have a lot of words like _assault_ and _you little shit_ in it, so Ed snarls back. “I just saved your fucking life, asshole!” 

Grabass sputters, partially in outrage but mostly because what Ed is self-defensively calling water is still streaming down his face. “You’re the one who _threw me in there!”_

“No, you fuckin’ _fell!”_ Ed scrambles up off all fours, swiping wet hair out of his face. “And this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t _slapping ass, you fucking asshole.”_

Saying it reminds Ed all over again that this guy could use a few more lessons in corrective behavior, actually, and he’s drawing his leg back to boot this fucker onto his back when Winry shouts _“Ed!”_

It warns Ed enough to dodge out of the way of the other cop’s nightstick, sending him lurching past and almost into Grabass, but the tone wasn’t _watch out_ so much as _what the fuck are you doing_ , which - she’s right. Ed is fully and legally a damn civilian, which means it’s going to be a bad fucking idea to catch the stick and thrash these two, because he’s already landed himself on the bullshit carousel just by decking this thick-skulled pervert. This is not a situation that is going to be solved by a couple of uppercuts.

Then the nightstick comes down again. Reflex takes over. There’s a fast couple of seconds, followed by Ed and the cop several feet apart, giving the nightstick identical looks of horror. This is due to it now being in Ed’s hand, where it is one hundred percent not supposed to be, not deescalating anything whatsoever. 

“Shit,” Ed and Winry say simultaneously, with pretty much equal levels of feeling. Behind the cop Grabass is staggering to his feet, clutching his head and groping for his cuffs. Ed decides disarming is his best bet and throws the nightstick over his shoulder - into, fuck, _shit,_ the canal. 

“Nobody move! You’re all under arrest!” Grabass yells. Nightstick cop snarls and charges. 

So they get arrested. Ed gets a little bit tackled, which probably would’ve gone worse for both of them if he hadn’t automatically flipped Nightstick’s charge to avoid getting a double dip in the water. This obviously doesn’t fucking win him any favors despite keeping Nightstick _dry_ , but they pretty clearly aren’t dealing with the goddamn intelligentsia tonight. Ed helpfully points this out and gets a lot of invective in return, followed by a pretty high-speed injunction into the back seat of their car, shortly joined by the others, sardining all of them haphazardly in a back seat meant for three not particularly large people. 

And every one of them is staring at him despite the fact that they’re basically all sitting on top of each other to fit, except Win, who’s just glaring. Ed scowls on principle. _What the fuck was that,_ Win glares; _well what the fuck was I SUPPOSED to do,_ Ed scowls back; _NOT FUCKING THAT,_ Win glares; _oh now THAT’S helpful,_ Ed scowls - 

“How did you _do that?”_

It’s Nerdlet. “Do _what,”_ Ed snaps. 

“You just - with your _knee,_ and then you just _spun_ him - and when he -” 

“Shut up back there!” Nightstick snarls, smacking the back of his hand against the wire mesh separating the front and back seats, and starts the car. 

Ed thunks his head back against the seat and takes satisfaction in the fact that he’s soaking the shit out of the upholstery, though even that’s mitigated by how he’s also getting Landy wet beside him and she’s starting to shiver. Ugh. Ed doesn’t have _time_ to sit around in jail. He’s got to go home and disinfect his leg port, for one thing, which he has learned has to be a nightly occurrence unless he wants that gross rash to come back. Especially now that the naggingly unsatisfying soreness between his thighs has been entirely replaced with a squelchingly comprehensive yuck. He fucking hopes that whatever inevitably disgusting mutant cholera he’s gonna get from his stupid canal dip makes the damn cop’s dick drop off. 

And Win’s only here for a week, which, fuck knows how long they’ll be sitting in lockup if the cops deny them bail. Which they will, because Ed was just so sparklingly quick on the uptake that he fucking disarmed one and clocked another into the river. 

Ugh. If Brinley wasn’t so drunk and Ed’s leg wasn’t so sore he would’ve made them all just run. Should’ve shoved ‘em _both_ in the river and taken off. Cops hate chasing people. This is what happens when he drinks; he gets fucking stupid. 

Nightstick and Grabass pull into the station compound and then leave them alone in the car, which isn’t much of an incentive to try anything given the parking lot is full of officers on break or off duty, standing around smoking and talking. If Ed were alone or just with Win he’d take his chances, but sardined in like this he’d need alchemy just to uncuff himself, let alone unlock the car. And it’s not like that’d be _hard_ \- his hands are practically squished together right now - but so far, he’s managed to keep anyone at school from finding out he’s an alchemist, and he’s gonna hold that streak as long as he can. 

Fuck, this is annoying. He’s not fucking sorry he punched Grabass, but he can tell that this isn’t, like, an _improvement_ on what it would’ve been if he’d just let it slide. He’s resigned to just sitting here in sullen silence until he realizes Landy’s not shaking because she’s cold. She’s crying. 

Win’s on the very other side of the seat, sandwiched into Brinley’s lap. Ed tries to crane around Landy to make SOS eye contact, but Win’s glaring out the window. Not that getting her attention will do more than make Win start yelling at him, but people generally stop doing what they’re doing to watch Win yell at him and he doesn’t see why crying would be any different. Win also hasn’t noticed the crying on her own, because Landy’s actually pretty quiet, and if Win _had_ noticed she’d be doing something about it because she’s a better person than Ed is. 

Ed does not have a great track record with getting people to _stop_ crying, but he needs to at least tap Winry in without going _YO. TEARS. YOUR 3 O CLOCK._ Landy’s tough, Ed knows for a fact - she’s like Al, cries about kittens and won’t bat an eye at broken bones and split skin - but - he’s only known her half a year. If that. And that’s not enough, he’s realizing, to really - know. Darius, Heinkel, Greed - he’d known all of them less than a _month_ before knowing exactly which way they’d go in a fight, what would get him cuffed over the head and what’d get them genuinely angry - hell, how they took their tea, when they could get tea. 

But those had been pretty different circumstances. 

“Hey,” he tries. “Are you… are the cuffs pinching?” 

Landy at least tries to get herself under control at that, sucking in a couple of deep breaths. “My mom’s gonna kill me,” she whispers, voice creaking. 

“Mine too,” Aline speaks up. She’s not crying, but she sounds way bleaker about it than Ed feels is warranted. 

That seems to be it, which. Okay. The flash of annoyance doesn’t last long, because Ed can recognize it’s stupid and pointless besides, to be - what, jealous of them? It’s _good_ they’ve got moms to worry, not least because it likely means they’ll be able to get out of this without any actual damage happening. Nobody goes to Central U poor, even if a lot of them think they are, so they’ll be able to afford the bribes, which means the cops will most likely just let them go after instead of charging them as accomplices to Ed’s assault on an officer or whatever. 

Win sighs. “Ask for a phonecall anyway.” She knows she and Ed are gonna have to do some really annoying negotiating just to get the chance to bribe themselves out instead of getting parked in fucking holding until sentencing. At least she knows Ed’s good to pay up for his dumbassery. “They’ll probably give it to you, especially if you cry a bit and talk about how your parents will really really want to avoid fuss and get you out. That’s generally gonna get a better deal for them than letting you wait for trial so the judge will take a cut,” she adds, reminding Ed that she’s been arrested like four times before, along with everyone else existing while teenager in Rush Valley. 

This is Central, though. And Ed’s only been arrested by military police before and as an alchemist besides, so his processing was always different from the start; to begin with, nobody’s pointing a gun at him and the officers left them without guard in this car. Presumably this intake’s gonna be the same, given he’s proven himself, ugh, violent, and he’s gonna have to figure out who and how to ask for a phonecall to Al - 

Only Al’s not even home. 

Shit. Ed has no idea whether that friend he’s staying with tonight even _has_ a phone, let alone the number. Teacher’s in Dublith and won’t have access to the necessary money unless Al writes her into the approved list on Ed’s accounts, but either way that’s going to take a while and the cops are probably going to bung him into prison to await sentencing first thing tomorrow morning just on sheer pissiness. Who does he even know in Central who’ll bail him out before dawn? 

Well, Mustang. But, well. Mustang. 

Mustang wouldn’t have gotten into this shit. If caught drunk and wandering some maintenance track he would’ve slicked out a smile and whipped out some words that wouldn’t even register as bribe _or_ threat, just go directly to the brainstem and whisper what a good idea it’d be to play nice. He would’ve had the cops tipping their hats to him after they dropped him off at his house, what a nice gentleman, no thank _you_ , sir, have a nice night. 

He would _not_ be impressed by this. Especially since Ed should not just know better but fully be capable of making sure that he, as a guy with some seriously sketchy shit going on in his background, stays away from any inconvenience run-ins with the system. 

Come to think of it. Ed is not actually sure whether he’s dead or not. 

That… might... be… a… problem. The cops are gonna run his ID to see if he’s got any priors, and he doesn’t actually know whether his military record is going to show up if they submit his identification number. Not that they’d _get_ his actual record, but they very well might get back that he _has_ one and that it’s sealed. Which wouldn’t really impact the cops much, but when someone tries to access a sealed military record, Ed knows, lots of little red flags go up. Especially in Intelligence. And Hughes doesn’t actually have _everyone_ in that department sitting pretty in his nooselike pockets. 

And since Ed hadn’t _actually_ died in any provable way - he’d just fucked off after the eclipse with Al, and the military hadn’t released any kind of official statement on him due to a combination of standard policy regarding State Alchemists and Mustang starting to grab people by the balls - there are a lot of people with questions about what did, in fact, happen to the Fullmetal Alchemist. Some of those people are now pretty high up in the military, and they are not what Ed would call his friends. 

Given that Ed would’ve gotten arrested at some point sooner or later, he probably should have given Mustang a call before now about what’s up with his ID. Or at the very least familiarized himself with who exactly would be getting notified, if civilian police ran his papers. Hughes, sure, but it’s not like Hughes is personally handling various police requests for document checks. And probably not any of his handpicked people, either. The cops liaise directly with the Justice Ministry first in any case, don’t they? Because they’re the ones who handle federal crimes and the priors check also determines whether he’s wanted in another province or whatever. So either way Intelligence wouldn’t get notified first, not until someone in Justice flagged it. And Ed’s not gonna assume Mustang has the _entire Justice Ministry_ on its knees asking for seconds, no matter what some squeak-voiced polisci undergrad’s dad thinks. 

Well, shit. 

Maybe Ed can bribe the cops in intake? Not that he has enough cash in the emergency stash in his boot to actually spring him once they’ve been brought all the way back to the station. And his wallet is already doubtlessly currently swamp-melding into a single fused wet lump in some evidence officer’s grubby thieving paw. Ed probably won’t even be able to promise his way into a private phone call - and it’ll have to be private, because for this, he does have to call Mustang. 

Going dark hasn’t actually required much effort on Ed and Al’s part, largely because Al is no longer a seven foot tall suit of armor and everyone knows the Fullmetal Alchemist had an automail arm. Fucking off to ass-nowhere immediately after the Promised Day and then mostly traveling since probably helped too. There aren’t a lot of photos of Ed in press and the ones that did once occupy front pages are generally blurry, half turned away or cutting off the entire bottom half of his face entirely due to the image being centered on Al. Not a lot of people know the Fullmetal Alchemist was named Elric, let alone Ed, but either way in his Modern Lit class alone there’s three Edwards, an Edgar and an Edrick, on top of like seventeen Elrics across campus, let alone all of Amestris. The most intensive thing they’ve had to do so far is bribe Granny with Cretan tobacco to write up Ed a fake set of immunization papers, since his actual vaccination records are in some military medical office in East HQ. 

But none of that’s going to matter, when it comes to his identification number and military record. And since Mustang hasn’t so much as raised the question of Ed returning to public visibility, he also doesn’t want to deal with people knowing Fullmetal’s not just not dead but right here in Central. Especially the brass. 

Okay. Making a break for it isn’t actually gonna solve anything, because making this _more_ of an incident is only gonna bring down more attention. They have his ID card, even if it is soaked, which in Ed’s case is gonna be worse than being booked as undocumented. He should’ve tossed his wallet when Win tossed the knife. Making them verify his name and number would’ve at least bought him some time. Fuck. He’s never drinking again. He can’t fucking afford to be this goddamn slow. 

Nightstick and Grabass come back, open the doors and start hauling them out, not particularly gently. Ed scowls and keeps his mouth shut and lets himself get towed along, deliberately not looking at Grabass the Wet Wonder so as not to start shit again. Doesn’t stop him from hearing the squelch of his boots, though, which is a tiny petty thing of a consolation prize given that Ed’s boots are squelching too. 

Luckily, an entire string of loud drunks are being processed by multiple pairs of officers right at the same time, so the intake desk doesn’t make time for Nightstick or Grabass to dick them around beyond shoving and growling. Winry formally requests a phone call and is just as formally denied, after an extremely clear once-over by the intake officer who isn’t even trying to hide that she’s pricing out Winry’s whole outfit down to the shoes. 

This fully shafts them into bitch category: they’re gonna be shaken down until the fillings come out. The precinct will give it a solid twenty-four to thirty-six hours without allowing any outside contact to let their loved ones get nice and worried, thus making them that much more eager to pony up with bribe money and uninclined to negotiate: anything, please, just let my sweet baby darling out of here. It’s a pretty fair bet on the cops’ part: they’re all clearly college kids, which means parents who can afford it, and Ed’s boots are new, Landy’s got gold earrings in and Brinley looks like he fell off a catwalk for a pretty specific kind of high-society underwear. 

No one else tries asking for a phonecall, sticking to watching Ed out of the corners of their eyes, looking watery and bleak and shrinking away from the cops. They get fingerprinted and photographed along with the long line of rowdy drunks, and everybody else gets their hands re-cuffed in front of them when they get their booking bracelet - unlike Ed, but it’s not like he wasn’t expecting it. It’s not exactly comfortable for his right shoulder, but the only cuffs that are genuinely gonna bother him are stocks and he’s not gonna give them a reason to even think of them. Hell, they haven’t even taken off his shoes. 

The building is old, half built over, and the holding cells are of course in the basement: one of the drunks - probably a regular in here - starts singing loudly as they get led down, clearly delighted by the echoes. They get lucky in the split - Win and the rest get a cell to themselves, and since Nightstick’s the one dragging Ed along by the arm he gets stuck in alone, the drunks all piled into the cell diagonally across from his. The cops go back upstairs, the door slams, and they’re left alone in the basement.

Ed stares at Win and the others. They stare at him. Aline looks deeply wary, Landy’s still crying, Brinley seems to be stuck in blank bafflement and Nerdlet’s expression is starting to veer dangerously close to the one he wore at the drinks table with his biker buddy. Ed makes eye contact with Win as much for self preservation as for communication purposes. 

She shuffles over to the corner of the cell, pressing her face to the bars, and Ed does the same on his side. “I need a distraction,” he mutters, as quiet as he can to still get heard under the drunks. 

Win’s face immediately goes forbidding. “For _what?”_

“To make a phone call,” Ed hisses. “I - look, we can’t just sit in here, and I need to -” 

“Al’s not gonna be able to -“

“I know, I _know.”_ Ed works his jaw for a second. “Not Al.”

Win’s expression does not improve, because even if she doesn’t immediately know who he’s calling the list of people is pretty much narrowed to Central and nobody here is without a price. “I know what I’m doing, okay? I’m getting us out of here,” Ed whispers. Which he will - he’s the one who got them arrested - but this has to be taken care of first. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the cell opposite them. “So I need to get to a phone. But _they’re_ gonna raise hell if they see me walk out -” 

“You need a distraction?” Landy says damply. 

She’s stood up too, moving to stand beside Winry. Ed and Win both look at her, then at each other. “I can spring us, I think,” Ed says after a second. “I just gotta make a phone call.” 

Aline and Brinley and Nerdlet are watching all of them now, all of their expressions merged into baffled cautious fascination. Landy’s big wet eyes go from Ed to Winry and back to Ed again. She sniffs. “You’re gonna get us out?” 

“Yeah,” Ed says, because hell, what’s a couple grand out of his bank account. Not like he can’t earn it back. “I am.” 

“Okay,” Landy says, wiping her eyes. Then she turns, walks to the other corner facing the drunks and lifts up the front of her shirt. 

Nerdlet gasps. One of the drunks in the cell glances over, double takes and bugs his eyes, frantically pats the arm of the guy next to him. “Whoa,” says Winry. 

“If you guys don’t make _any_ noise,” Landy says sternly, to her suddenly highly attentive audience, “I’ll take my bra off.” 

Rapt silence descends on the hallway. Win stares some more, then darts her eyes to Ed and jerks her chin sharply down the hall. He drops to the ground, face hot - he has to pike his legs up to fold himself in half and loop his cuffed arms from back to front, but then he’s free to move, and nobody’s watching except for Nerdlet, who’s got his mouth open again and can’t seem to decide which sideshow to ogle. Ed ignores him and jams himself into the very furthest corner between the bars and the wall - Landy’s bra, he can’t help but notice, is bright candy pink - and he hurriedly looks down, to where he’s jamming his left boot lengthwise into the space between the wall and the bars, heel to the stone. 

He’s got two joints in his automail leg, flexed in opposite directions. That means what he has - properly applied - is a titanium crowbar, capped on either end with solid steel. He braces his kneecap into the bar, sets his heel into the wall, and pushes his whole bodyweight down. 

The ancient metal bends with a creaking groan. There’s a startled noise from the other cell, some heads turning his way, but then Landy bounces up and down pointedly. “Hey,” she says, reproving, only slightly undermined by how she hiccups. “Eyes over here.” 

“Yeah,” Win agrees in a sugared voice, stepping up behind Landy and tossing her hair. “Don’t you wanna see what happens next?”’

Ed, face burning, crouches with his back to the wall, eels through the gap and takes off down the hallway before he can find out what kind of meltdown can be caused by a logarithmically intensifying cocktail of rage, awe and embarrassment. The window he saw in the stairwell should be just about big enough to fit him, and _that_ he can transmute open, because it’s a blind corner and there’s no one to see, splitting the chain on his cuffs while he’s at it. Then he’s outside, crouched on the tiny cement windowledge right by the building’s dumpsters. 

If he leaves the compound there’ll be public phones, but those are _payphones,_ and he doesn’t have any change. Ed grits his teeth, checks again for any witnesses and scampers up the wall towards the cop offices. 

He’s lucky: middle of the night shift means all the lights up here are off, all the agents on duty downstairs. No late nights for the boss. Ed grips onto the windowledge, practically mushing his nose to the glass, and scans the room. It’s hard to see in, dark inside as it is out, but Ed can just about make out the desk, chair, lamp - telephone. 

Jackpot. He jimmies the window - no alchemy necessary, it’s not even locked - why would it be, in a cop shop on the third floor? - and wriggles inside. He’s got Mustang’s personal line; he’s banking on the assumption that anybody calling Mustang does so only due to dire emergency, which hopefully means the bastard will pick up. Ed doesn’t know the current office phone number and he isn’t about to put _this_ call through the general switchboard. 

When the bastard does pick up, his voice is somehow even deeper than usual. “Mustang.” 

“Yo, it’s me,” Ed says, suddenly _extremely_ glad he’s not doing this in front of, oh, anybody. He rides out the familiar tingly swoop and fights the urge to cross his legs, suddenly extremely grateful everything in his pants is currently a no-go contamination zone. “I got a, uh, question. If Central cops run my ID, what are they gonna get back out of that?” 

_“Ed?”_ Mustang says, in rough bewilderment that segues immediately into, “What did you do.” 

“Nothing!” 

_“Nothing?”_

“Trespassing! I was walking some of the kids home from a party, we took a shortcut, ran into some cops -”

“ _Trespassing?”_ Mustang repeats, disbelief dripping. “That’s _it?”_

“Well, I might get done for some other stuff too,” Ed says, eyeballing the doorway and trying not to focus on how Mustang sounds like he’s been gargling sandpaper with strep. There’s a faint rustling over the line on his end, like fabric moving, like maybe Mustang rolled over - is he in _bed?_ Okay, it’d make sense for _him_ to have a phone on his nightstand, but - focus, focus. “It - depends. Point is, they took my info and they’re gonna run me, so - figured you should know.” 

Ed _feels_ Mustang go from exasperated to bastarding on all cylinders in the span of a second. “It _depends?”_

Ed closes his eyes and knocks his forehead a couple times against the wall. “I. Punched a cop.” 

There’s a short silence. “Alright,” Mustang says. “Why?” 

“He was being an asshole! And I’m -“ _stupid, stupid, defending a thesis in moron_ \- “drunk, so when he started slapping ass I decked him, into the canal, so they got - pretty mad about it. Look - they booked me, but I can… get out, probably, and figure out bail for -”

“No,” Mustang says flatly, a tone without any give, pulling Ed up short. 

Mustang doesn’t actually get pissed at him often. Ed’s seen real mad, and Mustang might bark but he doesn’t get there without some real fucking motivators. So Ed can tell himself it’s all part of the tingle, that stealing Mustang’s coffee and doodling in his work planner and replacing his dumb tulip doormat with _COME BACK WITH A WARRANT_ is all the adrenaline thrill of sticking his hand in the tiger’s mouth, but the truth is - he knows Mustang won’t bite him. Already bit him as hard as he could go, in fact, years ago, and isn’t about to shift his grip. There’s a safety there, in knowing exactly how bad something can hurt you. 

And Mustang _likes_ Ed - mainly because Mustang’s a perverse sadist bastard that’d cheer for anything that fucked with the military, but that doesn't change that he _does_ like him. Ed may have been put on this earth to spill, break, crash, ruin or otherwise void the warranty of anything unlucky enough to be in reach, but for Mustang, that’s always been a plus. 

So when he’s mad at Ed - _real_ mad, because Ed did something _dumb_ \- 

It doesn’t feel good. 

“Where are you?” Mustang says. 

He’s still flat with displeasure, the kind of voice that lives on the other side of arguments. “Uh,” Ed says, still taken aback. He wants to say - well, what? It’s not that bad? I can fix it? It is that bad, and he can’t fix it. It’s why he called in the first place. “West Central precinct, off Marble. In the drunk tank. Well - I broke out. And then back in. Calling from some cop office upstairs.”

Mustang gives a hard exhale that conveys several buckets’ of whiskey worth of how much he regrets ever trekking out to Resembool that one fateful October day. Ed’s starting to really hate everything about _this_ day, including the fact that he only no longer has Ponytail’s sweat on him by virtue of it having been replaced with filthy canal water. Even discovering the late-night burr in Mustang’s voice isn’t enough to mitigate things - not when this voice comes with it, the tone that says _you aren’t even worth an argument._ Ed’s _always_ worth the argument. 

Or at least he was. Back when he was a guy actually doing shit, not another drunk college hero discovering he’s not above consequences. 

“What are you wearing?” 

The noise that comes out of Ed sounds like a seagull choking on a slide whistle. _“What?”_

There’s another sigh. “How disreputable do you look right now, Elric?” 

“What?” Ed has no fucking idea what’s going on. “What does that have to do with - I dunno, medium?”

“Is Alphonse with you?” 

“No?” Mustang’s gotta be going somewhere with this. “Winry is. And some friends.” 

“What are their names?”

“Uh. You know Winry…”

Ed lists everybody off, though when he gets to Aline, Mustang says, sharply, “Toville?”

Shit, is her family famous or something? “Yeah,” Ed says cautiously. “Why?” 

“Get back in your cell and don’t give them a reason to transport you,” Mustang answers, which, okay, fucking fine. “I’ll take care of the paperwork. Stay put and play along.” 

And with that there’s a click, phone hanging up. 

Ed glowers at the handset for a bit. Fucking… bullshit cryptic double bullshit bouquet. Well, what did he expect. At least he’s passed on the necessary information. This is probably the best outcome his dumbass bullshit stupid night could get. 

Getting back to the cell isn’t that much harder than getting out, because the noise in the cellblock is up by an appreciable volume despite the fact that whatever Landy and Winry were doing is very much over. Ed remembers just in time to transmute his cuffs back together right before turning the corner, glad that any sounds are covered by the cell full of drunks having some kind of extremely involved argument that has all of them all huddled up in a circle. One guy does see him and starts to say, “Hey, what,” but Ed lets his face show exactly how good of a day he isn’t having. “Keep your mouth shut or I’ll come shut it for you,” he snaps, ramming his knee into the cell bar hard enough to dent it back into place, and the guy takes the hint. 

Winry and the others are all back on their bench, silently staring at him again, though at least with everyone’s clothes fully back in place. Ed tries not to glare back at them as he grits his teeth, pikes on the floor again and slides his cuffed hands behind his back, which is not fucking graceful no matter what you do. Brinley now looks vaguely green, Aline has a disturbed look and Nerdlet once a-fucking-gain is fishing for flies with his mouth open, but that’s probably because they all keep glancing between the bent cell bar and Ed’s leg like they’ve never seen automail before.

At least Landy’s busy rubbing her eyes with the backs of her wrists. Win just raises her eyebrows at him, more _now what_ than expectant. Ed glances over at the other cell, where the drunks are conducting their argument and very studiously not looking over at them. “Y’all okay in here?”

“Fine,” Win says, extremely dry. “They yelled some after we got tired of holding our shirts up, but I told them a couple of farm stories and they calmed _right_ down.”

“I didn’t know they did, they did _that_ to horses,” Brinley mumbles, now staring at the ground with the distinct look of someone who’s just experienced a highly detailed Rockbell educational experience about testicles. “They just… just like that, and then they take - and the _tweezers -“_

Win pats his thigh in a _there there, yes of course I know how to remove YOUR testicles but I’m not going to do it right this moment_ way. “And you?”

“Called.” Ed grunts sitting down on his own bench, knowing he probably looks more sour than confident. “Now we wait.”

None of them look particularly reassured, even if Win just seems mostly exasperated, but it does pretty much end the conversation, which works fine for Ed. He tips his chin down, making the direction of his gaze not obvious, and sizes up Aline. If Mustang recognized her last name, there’s probably leverage here she wouldn’t want anyone to have, in a way that’s a bit bigger than mommy and daddy pitching a fit. And accidentally or not, Ed just gave it to Mustang. 

However. If it’s leverage Mustang wants, he should probably have it. Ed has no idea who Aline’s parents are or what they do, but he _does_ know Mustang. If he’s just handed Mustang something he thinks he can use, it’s going to be for the specific purpose of making Amestris somewhat less of a shitshow. And if Ed tells Aline now, even without mentioning Mustang, that’ll most likely end up warning her parents. A warning Mustang probably wouldn’t want them to have. 

Ed keeps his mouth shut. He can’t afford not to think about the bigger picture. Not thinking about the bigger picture is what got them in here. He can’t just think about Aline and McKenna as _some kids I know, just friends from school._ He likes them well enough, but not so much that he’ll start sticking his oar in after siccing Mustang on them, inadvertently or not: he _did_ involve Mustang, and that supercedes the rest. Just another goddamn thing he should’ve thought of before thinking with his fist.

Anyway. They’re adults. So are their parents. And if they’re operating at a level where _Mustang_ is noticing them, that’s a pretty solid indicator that they can damn well take care of themselves.

Mustang’s help is announced by the door up above opening, echoing the sound of high heels rapping on concrete down the stairwell. The drunks briefly quieten down; a moment later a completely new cop with a sour look on his face leads a glossy-looking woman into the hall, walking past the drunk tank and gesturing flatly between their two cells. 

The woman gives Ed a cool look. Ed’s unclear as to what, exactly, he needs to be playing along with, so he keeps his mouth shut and tries not to glare. “Yeah, that’s them,” the woman says, unimpressed. “Come on, we haven’t got all night.” 

The cop proceeds to unlock the cells, ushering them out with an equally impatient look on his face. They get uncuffed, even, Win glancing back at Ed with a big _should we be going along with this?_ in her eyes as the woman leaves the hall without looking back, heading back up the stairs. Ed tries to communicate back that he has no fucking idea what’s going on but that if it’s getting them the fuck out of here they should take it. This is _probably_ Mustang’s doing - to be fair, Ed expected some harried 2LT, not a hot redhead in a trenchcoat managing to look money as hell despite straining hard up top to contain some serious figure - but then again, it makes sense that it isn’t: it’s the military Mustang doesn’t want finding out about Ed, after all, and it’s not like anyone else knows they’re here. 

They file out onto the main floor of the station, cop bringing up the rear. There’s another woman there, standing at the head of the bullpen, weight balanced on one hip and staring out at the room like it’s beneath her to even think of stepping further. She’s darker than Ed and blonder than Winry, eyes visibly green from across the room, and between the silk nightscarf slipping artfully off her hair and the glossy cigarette holder she’s smoking from, she looks rich, rolled out of bed and ready to make someone pay for it. 

And as they get closer, Ed realizes why Mustang asked him how trashy he looks: the makeup’s a little too vivid, the heels a little too high for anything but three o’clock in the morning. They’ve both got long coats on even though it’s not cold out, and that rolled out of bed look on the blonde one is definitely the result of a couple of hours’ work by a paid professional. If Ed thinks about it for one fucking second he is not at all surprised Mustang holds favors from professional escorts, nor that he’d use them for this. Thank fuck Winry didn’t decide to wear a real shirt tonight. Pretending to be a bunch of - what, junior hookers? Escorts-in-training? - is not something Ed would’ve thought of as an escape hatch, but he’ll take it.

“Thank you, Nasra,” the smoking woman says to the redhead, and Ed gets double confirmation she’s with Mustang: they both use the same kind of voice, the one that says they can make you strip naked right here if they wanted to and what’s more you should go to sleep every night begging your god it’ll happen. How well does Mustang know her? If Ed thinks about it for _two_ seconds, it’s actually pretty hard to picture Mustang paying for sex - going to the party districts, absolutely, but given how much he dates around, Ed can’t see why he’d bother to actually cash out. 

Unless he’s into like. Specific stuff. 

_Is_ he into stuff? _What kind?_

“Took them long enough,” the redhead says boredly, going to the smoking woman’s side; she narrows her eyes when she sees Ed staring, which, right, he’s got more immediate concerns than what freak flavor Mustang’s got hiding under the brick-thick overlay of roses-candlelight-and-missionary vanilla. Though it can’t be _too_ depraved - no, it absolutely has to be, that’s the only thing that’ll explain why Mustang has sex workers owing him and not the other way around: it’d be exactly like him, to go digging _before_ he does his dirties and line up some preemptive blackmail to get them on _his_ string before he ends up on theirs. 

“Keep better track of your merchandise,” one of the cops mutters, waving them to the glass-walled desk of intake and picking up the smaller ring of keys for the ID tagging bracelets. The two women ignore him. Ed doesn’t, because, okay - what do they think Ed and Win and everybody are? Some kind of group party favor? How often does that happen? Did someone go down a menu and say hey, I’d like the co-ed party pack, variety taste-test package? 

A door opens in the back of the room, and a stout, harried-looking guy in a creased shirt and suspenders sticks his head out, narrows his eyes and zeroes in on the smoking woman. “You,” he says, scowling. “Of course it is.”

“Detective Faisal,” the woman says languidly, more smoke drifting out on her breath, the air around her suffused bitter and floral. “Good morning.” 

“Yeah, hi. You’re all getting a ticket,” the man says crossly, waving around at Ed and the others. “Desk appearance, no argument. There’s enough on my plate already without getting into it with the courts.”

“We understand your position completely,” the woman demurs, somehow managing to project that she’s apologized while simultaneously making it understood she wouldn’t fucking lower herself. “But we can’t help accidents, Detective. None of them even have priors.” 

Boy, Ed sure hopes she’s right. “You make it to booking, you get written up. You get written up, you’re my problem,” the detective says flatly, making a cutting gesture in front of him. “Rules are rules. What am I supposed to tell the captain, the dog ate our paperwork?” 

The smoking woman could now be said to look amused, if crocodiles could be said to smile. “How could I possibly argue?” 

It sounds like she’s agreeing, and it only makes the detective’s face tighten, his shoulders setting like he’s bracing for something. There’s not a single doubt left in Ed’s mind that this lady’s from Mustang. “I mean it, Dianne. DAT or they stay in.”

Dianne sighs and spins her cigarette holder once, somehow not spraying ash everywhere. “Oh, Faisal. You know I can’t say no to you.” And then she’s the one to nod to the intake officers, as if granting them permission to proceed; Faisal looks frustrated and tense but doesn’t say anything as the officers start pulling papers out as Dianne gives him another smile. “Desk appearance it is.”

And they get processed right back out again. None of the officers look particularly thrilled about it, though to be fair most of them are too busy ogling in a vaguely resentful sort of way to be paying much attention to Ed’s group as the general hum of the bullpen resumes. To be fair, Ed’s focused on Dianne too: she even _smiles_ like Mustang, if you ignore all the stuff like shape and race and actual features. _That_ Ed can’t explain away with just Mustang being her best customer or whatever. It’s too close, too much a mirror, and you don’t get _that_ just from pay to play appointments. 

Unless it’s like. A really regular thing. _How_ regular of a thing? How well does she know Mustang? Is she mirroring him on _purpose? Why?_

Ed’s so absorbed he doesn’t even realize someone’s trying to crowd him until his scalp prickles, someone broader and taller moving in. A second later Grabass leans in over his shoulder, close - but not too close, Ed notes with cold satisfaction. “Be careful, kid. I can make your life _real_ difficult.” 

It’s such a nonsense fucking sentence that for a second Ed can’t even process: everything just grinds to a halt, full stop. Make his life difficult. Make his _life, difficult._ Ed just had to call Mustang to let him know that oops, he might’ve just fucking put both their boots on a little landmine, just kickstarted a manhunt and a power struggle they were both really hoping to avoid, and _this_ little two-bit motherfucker is _still here._ Still thinks he can do whatever he wants. Still sticking his hands anywhere, still without consequences, still a _problem._

“How?” 

That seems to throw him. “What did you say?” 

“How are you going to make my life difficult?” Ed repeats, turning to face him fully, and he can tell his expression is probably too open, too honest by the way the cop’s face flickers with sudden uncertainty. He’s six foot something, twice Ed’s weight, and he’s only just now starting to understand it’s not gonna save him. “Come on. Tell me.”

“We are _leaving,”_ Winry’s voice says sharply, right behind Ed, and a hand clamps onto his shoulder. 

“No, this sounds important,” Ed says, not letting Win move him. If this fucking slimeball wants to be a big scary so bad Ed will teach him what it means to punch out of your weight class. “Sounds like something I need to know. It’s important to listen to officers of the law.”

Grabass is staring at him, and at this point so is everyone else in arm’s reach, but the parts of Ed that can care aren’t all that big compared to the rest of him, awash in rage so bright it feels like clarity. Think bigger, act later? There is no later. _Later_ is Grabass grabbing someone else, threatening someone else, finding a real kid whose life he really _can_ make miserable. Ed would rather break both his hands in three places and let him learn the hard way that you don’t start shit with cute little coeds lest one of them turn around and finish it. A lesson without pain is meaningless. 

“You better watch yourself,” Grabass says, a second off-beat but still looming. Yeah, this one won’t learn without blood. 

A stream of smoke blows past Ed’s ear. “Not the time, darling,” Dianne says, not sounding particularly interested, and once again Ed hears Mustang. Grabass must hear it too, because his eyes leave Ed for her; the intake officers have slowed or paused and more than a few others around the bullpen are very much looking like they want to get involved. “Make an appointment and you can watch whatever you like. But for now -” 

Here she runs her hand over Ed’s hair, playfully tugging his wet ponytail in a way he can tell isn’t anything but a threat. “We’re on a schedule. Let’s go.”

Her hand stays in his hair. Ed turns his head to look back at her, over his shoulder. She meets his gaze evenly, just as ready and willing to yank him down and drag him out by the hair as he is to put Grabass’s head through the glass intake partition. 

Definitely with Mustang. 

“Let’s go,” Ed echoes. She lets go. Ed turns to her fully, turning his back on Grabass, and a distant part of him appreciates how easy she’s made it, to keep him tracking the bigger threat. 

The high recedes. She’s not going to do anything to him, not when he’s doing what she wants. The outwash of adrenaline leaves him cold, colder still with the prickle of pre-fight awareness, his clothes feeling twice as heavy and wet as before. Landy, Brinley, Aline and Nerdlet are all back to staring at him, not even trying to be discreet about it. Maybe it’s a little early in life for a full stop no on drinking. 

There’s a car outside, a big black low-slung thing, and the redhead gets in the driver’s seat while Dianne takes the front passenger side. The kids shuffle a bit before Winry opens the back door and starts waving them inside, getting in last before Ed and putting herself as a kind of buffer between him and them. The whole interior smells like Dianne, perfume rich enough to register through the exhale of her cigarette and expensively made enough not to saw across the sinuses despite it; Ed inhales deep, not particularly loving the scent but aware he needs to - regulate. It’s starting to register that he - well, wasn’t _wrong,_ but in this case being right meant almost daring a cop to start a fistfight with him inside a police station. 

“So,” Dianne says mildly, reclining back in her seat in a way that lets her look back at them, eyes half lidded. The redhead hasn’t moved to start the car. “That could have gone worse.” 

“Thank you very much, Miss Dianne,” Winry tells her, very polite even as she shoots Ed a _we’re going to TALK_ look, the rest of the kids all huddled silent and staring on the other side. “We really appreciate it.” 

“You’re quite welcome.” Dianne takes another easy drag of her cigarette, her gaze on Ed. “Now Roy owes me a favor.” 

That sets Ed on his back foot. He called Mustang to warn him, not for a bailout. He was going to get them out himself. “I didn’t ask him for this.” 

Dianne tilts her head just so at him, her kohled eyes luminous even in the dim light of the streetlamps. “Would you like to owe me instead?” 

Ed slowly sets his jaw. His pride says, _yes._ Owing the bastard is one thing; owing other people _through_ Mustang, though - Ed’s not anyone’s handout case, and whatever debts he incurs he’ll pay for. His problem; his payment. It’s what being a man means. But Dianne didn’t say that like someone just trying to make a point. If he tells her _yes, this one’s on me_ \- she’ll take it. 

And he has no idea who this lady even is, while she very clearly knows _him._

Better to deal with the devil you know. “No,” he says, trying not to talk through his teeth. “I’ll stick to - Roy.” 

_That_ makes her smile, brilliantly white teeth gleaming. “Smart puppy,” she says, too approving to be anything but mocking. “Though he did say you were.” She says it like she definitely didn’t believe it and still doesn’t, twisting back around and casually checking her lip color in the rearview mirror. “I can drop you off on the Victory Hill station, it’s on my way. Trolleys will be running in half an hour. Oh - and he said don’t touch the paperwork. He’ll let you know if he needs anything.” 

Fucking great. Ed knew he’d be relying on Mustang anyway in order to fully sort out his identity bullshit - part of why he’d avoided addressing it so far, if he forces himself to be honest - so it’s not too much of a stretch for Mustang to just take it over and do it all himself, especially since he’s got Hughes at his disposal and Ed doesn’t. But there’s a difference between agreeing to allocate tasks based on resources and being told to sit down and keep his nose out of it. Worse still to deserve it. 

One unexpected police run-in, one second of reflex taking over, one stupid fucking party drink - just like that, Ed’s in debt up to his collarbones. Six people out of lockup, in the middle of the night, a paper-maze race for Mustang to run if he doesn’t want both of them yanked back into a political knife fight neither of them have time for. And because Ed’s just that smart, that quick, that talented, whenever he screws it _big_ he’s never alone: Winry’s right here with red marks on her wrists from the cuffs, Landy with her half-dried tears, Aline white-faced and Brinley and some kid whose name Ed doesn’t even fucking know all crammed back in here with him. All because he let one stupid little cop stop spin out of control. 

And he would’ve taken it further. He doesn’t know who the fuck Dianne is, but if Mustang had sent someone else, Ed wouldn’t have turned his back on Grabass until the man was out cold on the ground. He hadn’t cared that the room was teeming with other officers, that he would’ve gotten guns drawn on him, drawn on Winry, that it wouldn’t have _fixed_ a single goddamn thing. 

He’s got a problem. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Roy hangs up. He considers peeling his eyes open. He decides against this. He picks up the phone again. He dials. 
> 
> “Back room back office, who ya talkin’ to?” 
> 
> “Hey Becka,” Roy says, not opening his eyes. “S’me. Can you get me Di?” 
> 
> “Hooo boy,” Becka says, and gets him Di.
> 
> “Hey Di.” 
> 
> “You die,” Dianne says boredly, which is how she’s been answering the phone since she was sixteen. “Why are you awake? Do we need to leave the country again?” 
> 
> “Remember how in seventh year you stole my school uniform and gave it to your boyfriend to cut up -” 
> 
> “Oh my god, seriously?”
> 
> “- so you could do that creepy cabaret, and it ruined my uniform -”
> 
> “That was like twenty years ago!”
> 
> “- and the National Assembly visit was the next day and I almost got expelled for it?” 
> 
> Di makes a violently disgusted noise, probably stubbing out a cigarette. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Just tell me what you want.” 
> 
> “Spring some kids from West Central lockup.” 
> 
> “Kids?” 
> 
> “Well. One. But the others will be useful later.” 
> 
> “And who the fuck is this one exactly?” Di says suspiciously, which means she’s gonna do it.
> 
> Roy sighs. “A national treasure,“ he says, giving her the details, then rolls over and goes back to sleep.


End file.
